in reply to Molly White

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Molly White

Newspapers’ estimates of the $TRUMP token’s fully diluted value fluctuated wildly from somewhere around $20 billion to around $70 billion, depending on which paper you read and when they published.

This variance perhaps should have been a sign to these reporters that the numbers aren’t real.

#crypto #cryptocurrency #DonaldTrump #USpolitics #USpol

When Donald Trump launched a memecoin days before his inauguration, newspapers were quick to try to grab headlines with huge numbers. “The $TRUMP memecoin — a financial asset that didn’t exist on Friday afternoon — now accounts for about 89% of Donald Trump’s net worth,” wrote Axios, which dubbed him a “crypto billionaire”.1 “[T]he so-called fully diluted value of all the tokens as of Saturday at noon was $30 billion, a number achieved less than a day after the token went on the market,” wrote the New York Times.2 Newspapers’ estimates of fully diluted value fluctuated wildly from somewhere around $20 billion to around $70 billion, depending on which paper you read and when they published.
That the numbers fluctuated by about $50 billion within the span of only hours or days perhaps should have been a sign to these reporters that the numbers aren’t real. Fully diluted valuation is an estimate so flawed that even publishing it should be considered journalistic malpractice. It is calculated by taking the current going price for a crypto token on an exchange and multiplying it by the total number of tokens that may ever exist for that cryptocurrency. To use $TRUMP as an example, people are currently trading these coins for around $53 apiece. There are 200 million of them in circulation, which puts the token’s (already highly questionable, as I explain in a moment) “market cap” at around $10.7 billion. Eventually, over a period of three years (assuming Trump does not lose interest or change the parameters of the deal), 1 billion tokens are set to be released. It is this supply — three years from now — that is being multiplied by the current price of the tokens to achieve estimates in the several tens of billions for how much Trump’s “net worth” has increased, as though it can be safely assumed that not only will the price remain stable over the next three years, but that there is another more than $40 billion that is guaranteed to just materialize.
#crypto #uspol #cryptocurrency #uspolitics #donaldtrump
in reply to Molly White

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Molly White

This is not to downplay the extent to which Trump is grifting his devotees and crypto traders looking to make a buck on memecoin speculation. But it is important that we accurately report on his cons and don’t contribute to misleading crypto hype for the sake of large numbers.

#crypto #cryptocurrency #DonaldTrump #USpolitics #USpol

#crypto #uspol #cryptocurrency #uspolitics #donaldtrump