GM HEARTLAND |
God bless America — and all the beautiful meme coins in it. |
—El Prof, Muhammed & Chad |
MONEY MONEY MONEY
TOKEN | PRICE CHANGE | PRICE |
---|---|---|
Solana ($SOL) | +2.52% | $138.22 |
Helium ($HNT) | +0.00% | $3.14 |
Pyth ($PYTH) | +6.85% | $0.29 |
Solend ($SLND) | -18.80% | $0.41 |
(Price changes reflect past 7 days as of 7.12.24)
Did the Debate Move Crypto Markets?
The price of Bitcoin took a tumble just before the first U.S. presidential debate in June, and remains down 6% since. Did the debate trigger this market movement, or were other forces at play?
In short: probably other forces. The debate did not address cryptocurrency or blockchain-related topics. Factors like regulatory updates, market sentiment, and global economic conditions are likely what drove market fluctuations during that period. For example, the week before the debate, China announced a crackdown on crypto mining operations, which sent shockwaves through the market and likely contributed to the price dip.
However, there was some DeFi volatility for which the debate surely shoulders the blame. We’ve previously covered the proliferation of political meme coins, now dubbed PolitiFi. Perhaps unsurprisingly, coins like $BODEN and $TRUMP were influenced by the debate — and, like the candidates in question, had a pretty rough night.
Starting 20 minutes before the debate, $TRUMP went into a nosedive, sliding nearly 25%. But $BODEN — like, as many have argued, its namesake — had the worst night. During the debate, the meme token shed more than 50% from its 24-hour high.
A discrepancy between the price movement of major cryptocurrencies and highly volatile meme coins may be nothing new, but it does represent a broader shift in the industry; namely, its growing maturity. There was a time when it felt like making a significant investment in Bitcoin was so risky, it might hit zero next time you check the app. But short-term events no longer seem to substantially influence investor sentiment.
For savvy degens — or degenerate gamblers — there is still a way to play cultural moments, in the form of meme coins. But these opportunities are becoming increasingly niche, and require a nuanced understanding of how these volatile markets typically move. (For instance, it’s notable that $TRUMP started shedding value before the event even began, suggesting its movement had nothing to do with the content or outcome of the debate, but with traders riding the hype train, then locking in profits ahead of time.)
The major coins, meanwhile, will surely see their value impacted by future policy decisions by elected officials, like any other popular asset. But the days of fearing you’ll lose your life’s savings thanks to an errant Trump-ism may be in the rearview — unless, of course, you have your life’s savings in $TRUMP.
—Muhammed
Could Web3 Solve the Voter ID Problem?
I’m so grateful to Muhammed for covering the divisive debate, freeing me up to discuss a far less polarizing election-adjacent topic: voter ID laws.
For someone to participate in the election process and cast a vote, they must identify themselves with a trusted form of paperwork. But the question of how stringent these requirements should be is a hot-button topic, with proponents maintaining strict ID laws are crucial for a fair and honest democracy, while critics say these restrictions mainly serve to suppress marginalized communities and voices more.
I see both sides. On paper, I’ve always understood the right-leaning arguments about why this part of the voting and electoral process is necessary. In practice, I can also recognize that it’s a meaningless bottleneck that discourages participation from some substantial percentage of the electorate, while failing to address its stated goal.
The main problem: It’s all paper! And, as a company that knows a little something about $PAYPR, we would argue paper is not very computationally friendly in its present form.
If you wanted to see if someone cast multiple election votes in different parts of the country, or even the same precinct, you’d have to manually cross reference all the votes in the pool to do so. And, no shade, but the overworked, low-wage data entry workers expected to execute that task don’t have a ton of incentive to do an exhaustively thorough job.
In other words, even if we had effectively strict federal voter ID laws in place, the trust inspired by said IDs is quite literally paper-thin, and precinct officials aren’t in a real position to discern the real ones from the fake. So all of the systems in place fail in practice to deliver on safeguarding elections. It’s a false sense of security, a pacifier for a group of paranoid citizens.
Enter web3. As a distributed ledger, the blockchain could serve as a record for recording anonymous, verified, and most importantly, de-duplicated votes. This means that it could feasibly enable real-time live voting, at a municipal, state, national, or even global level.
That is, of course, assuming someone solves the digital identity problem first — because digital identity solutions, means only one official, digital you.
—El Prof