| If there's an industry that knows how to roll with the punches, it's crypto. And on Monday, Wall Street got a taste of the kind of market mania that digital-asset traders have long taken in stride as just another day in the office. What looked like a headline from a news service went viral on social media on Monday morning in New York, triggering a $2.5 trillion upswing in the S&P 500 in just seven minutes. The jump, buoyed by the possibility presented in the posts on X that President Donald Trump might pause tariff plans for 90 days, was welcome relief for asset managers who had braced for bear market territory after days of heavy declines. Yet those gains disappeared just as quickly when it was revealed the news was fake. Cryptocurrencies mimicked the same rise and fall as equities, proving once again that the asset class is just as exposed to global market panic as everything else. However, in traditional finance, the frenzy left minds blown. After all, a half-hour 10% swing in the Nasdaq is practically unheard of. Meanwhile, all the drama left many crypto traders laughing. As Trump's tariff war unfolded over the last week, memes filled the timelines of crypto users on social media. Such price swings are nothing compared with the 1,000% leap in Trump's own memecoin on its launch day, after all. "Buy the dip!" said one post, a meme featuring the scene in Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith where Obi-Wan Kenobi laments Anakin Skywalker's turn to the dark side while the latter burns in lava. "This is the fifth dip this week," Skywalker roars in reply.
Despite the jokes, there was another theme underlying much of the online chatter: The sense that Trump might have finally stepped over the line. Crypto companies, entrepreneurs and investors had rallied behind the president's campaign last year, banking (literally) on Trump's promise to make the US the crypto capital of the world. On Monday, what traders received instead was the near completion of a total wipeout of all price gains made since he returned to the White House.  To be sure, electing Trump has delivered many of the industry's most-desired results. Gary Gensler, one of crypto's top adversaries in his role as the previous chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, stepped down from his post shortly before Trump's inauguration. The Trump-era SEC in turn has paused or dismissed many of its most high-profile enforcement cases against crypto companies, and lawmakers are working on new legislation to regulate parts of the market. Either way, being a crypto true believer requires ignoring short-term market gyrations. The industry's HODL mantra — a misspelling of "hold" that some interpret to mean "hold on for dear life" — instructs traders to weather all storms and never sell their positions in the hope of future gain.
It won't be long before the crowd moves on to its next narrative — and memes. | 
No comments:
Post a Comment