Does PoliFi have staying power? The market isn’t so sure.
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MAGA, a Trump-themed PoliFi token, is down double digits after the re-election of Donald Trump, an unexpected outcome for a token that is supposed to rise on positive news.
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However, PoliFi tokens also act as a ticket for a themed-community, which has longer staying power than speculating on numbers going up.
The crypto market seems to be losing interest in Political Finance (PoliFi) memecoins a day after Donald Trump was re-elected president of the United States.
MAGA, the Trump-themed PoliFi token that is credited with creating the genre is down nearly 49% on-day, and nearly 50% during the last week. Its Kamala Harris-themed counterpart, Kamala Horris, trading as KAMA, is down 75% during the same time period.
Now the question is, like prediction markets – Polymarket’s betting volume consisted of 75% election-related markets, according to Dune – are PoliFi tokens ready for their next act.
In theory, PoliFi tokens are supposed to rise whenever there is a positive event involving the candidate they are tied to.
Shortly after the MAGA token’s launch in February, Mechanism Capital’s Andrew Kang said in an interview that a Trump-themed PoliFi token leverages Trump’s media presence in the attention economy, “and Trump is probably one of the best attention monopolizers in the world.”
At the time, Kang also hedged his optimism for the token post-election by saying there might be a “sell the news” effect.
“However, I anticipate a period of consolidation following his election victory, similar to how dogecoin behaved after it became associated with Elon Musk,” he said at the time.
The MAGA token has also struggled to hit higher levels of liquidity because it was blocked from major retail centralized exchanges (CEX).
While the token trades on a number of decentralized exchanges (DEXs), and some lesser-known exchanges like Gate.io, MEXC, and BingX, it was blocked from being listed on Kraken, ByBit, and OKX.
Kraken, for its part, lists the satirical TREMP, as well as BODEN.
It could also be that traders are shifting into (BTC) after the election, as bitcoin blew past its all-time high, with some bullish market observers calling for $100k by the end of the year. Potentially challenging that thesis, however, is that memecoins are up by 12% on-day, according to CoinGecko data, and one would expect them to drop as well if traders were broadly shifting into BTC.
Of course, number-go-up isn’t the only use case for PoliFi tokens. They are also a ticket to a community, which, if done correctly, is a staying power longer than short-term profit or losses.