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Celerity

(53,550 posts)
Wed Dec 24, 2025, 10:06 AM 2 hrs ago

As The Trump Administration Embraces Cryptocurrency, "Meme Coins" Spread Hate and Enrich Their Creators


Popular cryptocurrency exchange platforms such as Binance are used to peddle bigotry.

https://globalextremism.org/post/meme-coins-spread-hate/



Cryptocurrency creators are making hundreds of thousands of dollars from extremist ideas and Nazi symbolism. “Meme coins,” which are cryptocurrency coins made to be “jokes,” co-opt far-right extremist ideas and symbols in their design, drawing from Trump’s racist mass deportation policy, depicting the Nazi Black Sun symbol, and depicting imagery related to neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes’ Groyper movement. New meme coins are constantly produced to exploit the virality of extremist tropes, such as bigoted recruitment posts made by the DHS and ICE.

A new investigation into these extremist meme coins by the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism (GPAHE) has uncovered a multi-million dollar extremism economy on cryptocurrency marketplaces such as Binance, which boasts $65 billion in average daily volume (i.e., total value of coins traded in one day), and 300 billion spot transactions (i.e., a purchase or sale of a currency with instantaneous delivery) in 2022. It’s AI summary feature inexplicably promotes neo-Nazi coins as “innovation,” as Binance earns money on trades involving them by taking a 0.1% fee on every spot trade. Meanwhile, users can generate income from extremist ideologies through meme coin websites such as pump.fun, which offers revenue sharing rewards for content creators, equating to $500 paid in Solana (a cryptocurrency) for $1 million in trading volume, $2,500 for $5 million, and $10,000 for $20 million.

Cryptocurrencies (“crypto”), a series of largely unregulated online digital currencies, such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana, among many others, have a global market cap of over four trillion dollars. Crypto is commonly traded on marketplaces such as Binance, Crypto.com, Kraken, and others. “Meme coins,” which are cryptocurrencies produced as “jokes,” are part of this ecosystem, with its creators able to make millions by capitalizing on social media trends. Oftentimes, meme coin creators will buy the coin (or “token”) right after it launches, and sell after it gains traction, while others reap the rewards of revenue sharing systems. Hate runs through crypto culture, and especially in meme coins. Crypto was born from the finance and tech industries, whose male-dominated nature has been correlated with “rampant bigotry.”

In May 2025, 50 invitees to a Trump meme coin dinner were found to hold crypto assets with alt-right imagery, swastikas, references to antisemitism, and a racial slur. Cryptocurrencies also enable the proliferation of extremist ideologies and fundraising for American neo-Nazi organizations such as the National Socialist Movement (NSM), the Goyim Defense League (GDL), and Nationalist Social Club 131 (NSC-131). Trump has promised to turn the United States into the “crypto capital of the world.” Crypto.com, a cryptocurrency exchange website, donated eleven million dollars to political committees associated with Trump, sparking concern from legal and ethics experts about potential conflicts of interest. Trump pardoned Binance founder Changpen Zhao in November, who was sentenced to prison in 2024 after pleading guilty to failing to maintain an anti-money-laundering program.

Bigoted Profiteering Inspired By The White House...................

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