35 – Crypto-Billionaire-in-Chief

A Lifetime In 96 Hours

The last 96 hours have been exhausting. Why wouldn’t it be for the industry that never sleeps? Web3 is 24/7. So what happens when MLK Day, the CFP Championship Game, and the coronation of our new Crypto-Billionaire-in-Chief all fall within the same 24?

Two words: price action. And boy did we get some action. It started with an announcement that American-made web3 solutions would be championed by the Trump administration. (Although it sacrilegiously named XRP and Solana in the same breadth, two projects that couldn’t represent fundamentally more different approaches to building solutions in the space, and yet also the mostly likely rails of our future.)

But this announcement was merely a precursor for what followed next, which was a launch of the official $TRUMP presidential commemorative token (read: shitcoin) on the Solana blockchain, seemingly a fundraising event for the Trump-backed crypto projects within the Ethereum ecosystem.

(Full disclosure: the 🖤+SOL team holds the shitcoin in question. I entered at a $27M marketcap with a modest .1 SOL bet at the insistence of my fellow writer Muhammed, which I rode all the way to $70M — and back down to $30M.)

So what does it mean to be standing in an era where the sitting President opens his second term with a rug pull? While, on the other end of the spectrum, we’ve got

I wish I had an answer. But the bizarre and short-lived TikTok ban, despite amounting to just a few hours of non-access, thoroughly disrupted my Sunday morning info consumption. So I’m not sure what the plot of anything is anymore. 

But we have to start the search somewhere, so let’s start there. The original movement to ban TikTok in the US actually began as a Trump initiative to counter the influence of China. That was before he was convinced by Barron to leverage the platform for his reelection campaign by influencing young, male voters, an overwhelming majority of which overlap with the current online crypto communities. But at some point in there, it was co-opted by a foreign lobby with a lot to lose from millions of Americans getting together and criticizing the way they wage war, or influencing their access to American taxpayers’ funds.

As a dyed-in-the-wool data nerd, the argument that TikTok has too much access to consumer data feels off. The thesis goes that TikTok is a China-owned propaganda machine influencing American’s political positions. But that doesn’t entirely jive with the reality, which is that TikTok is banned in China (yes, really), based in Singapore, owned by private individuals from multiple countries, and has less access to data than the average American tech company.

But officially, it’s the data, not the influence, driving the ban. That’s because the data represents the inputs for TikTok’s algorithm, which I am 100% convinced is an unsupervised learning algo aimed at delivering you a personalized feed to maximize your session time by matching videos to your expressed preferences based on past viewing behaviors. This is something American social media companies simply can’t do, because it is not the most direct path to profitability. Instead, they are incentivized to favor the content that primes you to engage with ads, so they can make more money. But that in turn undermines their own usefulness and influence, which is why TikTok is eating their lunch.

The point being, in midst of a major sea change in crypto/online/American culture, only the fools are pretending like they have any clue where this is all going. The Convicts are whooping the Catholics (there’s a Miami in Ohio, and I’m a Wolverine), Zuck caught a

We live in the most absurd timeline. Until next week.

—El Prof