Milei's meme coin woes

Another head of state promoted a meme coin, only this time it went very, very badly.

Why it matters: There's been a lot of talk about why the Official Trump meme coin could be bad, but the Argentinian experiment did go bad, in less than a weekend.

Catch up fast: Friday evening, Javier Milei announced a Solana token with a tweet. The token was called LIBRA. It exploded in value, getting up to over $4 billion in market cap.

• (Market cap being the value of all the tokens in existence — an especially fuzzy measure in the blockchain world.)
• Not long after, it crashed over 90% in value, following a massive sale of the token, apparently by insiders (what has the look of a rug pull to many).
• The next day, Milei deleted the original tweet. He wrote another saying that he was just promoting a private venture and he had nothing to do with it.

The latest: A judge has been appointed to investigate Milei's administration for fraud.

What they're saying: "This is the latest sordid episode emanating from Solana's meme coin complex, which as a whole is down significantly since topping in January on the launch of $TRUMP," Alex Thorn, research chief at Galaxy Digital, wrote in a report that goes into detail about allegations of insider trading on the LIBRA coin.

• 🍿 One on-chain sleuth presented evidence that seems to link dumping on LIBRA with dumping on Melania Meme, the first lady's meme coin.
• The platform used to launch it, Meteora, put out a lengthy defense of its approach following the debacle, and one of its co-founders resigned.

Flashback: LIBRA was going to be the name for the stablecoin that the company then known as Facebook wanted to launch before Western regulators slapped it down.

Zoom out: The scandal has finally put headwinds on Milei, who the world has reluctantly feted as he delivered results on fixing his nation's economy, delivering a trade surplus and putting the brakes on inflation.

• The slash-and-burn model that Milei has taken is one that Elon Musk seems to be emulating with the Department of Government Efficiency.

The upshot: The drama has knocked Solana's SOL coin down a notch on the global charts, falling back below Binance's BNB token again.

• SOL was trading at $204.90 at its Friday peak. It's now at $170, a 17% drop.
• But it's still the sixth-largest crypto asset in the world.