Arthur Hayes Argues Donald Trump’s Memecoin Will Upend Politics

BitMEX founder Arthur Hayes believes President Donald Trump’s memecoin will change the political landscape forever.

$TRUMP, Hayes argues, is the latest in a line of political media outlets that stretches from the radio and television to social media and podcasts.

“Trump has ushered in a new era of political memecoins,” Hayes said. “I argue that political memecoins will do the following: Offer a true real-time global opinion poll on politicians, allow political campaigns to increase engagement and reach at almost no cost, and onboard billions of people into Web3.”

He starts with the idea that what people say about politicians in public is not what they believe in private.

“This puts politicians in a bind because they want to know our genuine private opinions in real time,” Hayes said. “Political memecoins offer zero-knowledge proof of political popularity. Specifically, as an individual, you can now privately support a politician by purchasing their memecoin, who your friends abhor, and face no social stigma. Thus, a politician gains information on the genuine opinion of the people.”

Skin in the Game

Hayes makes the obvious comparison with the prediction market Polymarket, which won fame and criticism for calling the election far better than pollsters and the mass media did.

Like Polymarket, buying political memecoins makes people put real money behind their political opinions. Unlike Polymarket, he says, it also funds those politicians who can keep the vast majority of their tokens and sell them to supporters or to pay campaign expenses.

He glosses over the criticism that they let individuals, corporations and even countries effectively give politicians large sums of money without leaving a trail. But it’s better than “accepting pseudo bribes from wealthy corporations and individuals behind closed doors,” he said.

Hayes also points out that Polymarket is banned in France, arguing that it was done “lest the unfiltered, genuine public opinion be expressed in real-time.”

A political memecoin traded on a decentralized exchange (DEX), on the other hand, is “the perfect instrument” for creating “a popularity metric that is globally accessible, easy to understand, and impossible to ban,” he said.