Inside the first Crypto Ball: Snoop, the Treasury Secretary—and a $70 billion memecoin surprise from Trump

An excited murmur began to spread just before Snoop Dogg took the stage. Adorned in tuxedos and floor-length gowns, the elite of the crypto world passed along the news: President-elect Trump, the absent guest of honor for the celebration, had just taken to social media to Bitcoin, and one that is still rife with rampant scams—digests what it means to be part of the government itself.

Make Bitcoin Great Again

Despite the exultant atmosphere—with (apparently fake) Trump-branded slippers handed out alongside "Make Bitcoin Great Again" hats—some cautioned the crypto industry has experienced similar heights before and fallen hard not long after. The 2021 Bitcoin conference in Miami, where Paris Hilton performed a DJ set and a company set a dumpster of Venezuelan bolivars aflame, served as a cautionary peak before the following year's rapid collapse.

One attendee, gazing out at the revelry, remarked that the affair reminded them of a Shakespeare line from Romeo and Juliet quoted in the HBO show Westworld: "These violent delights have violent ends."

The $70 billion memecoin

And indeed there are plenty of signs that, despite crypto's newfound political respectability, many of the dynamics that made it so notorious in the first place have not gone away. That includes the recent debacle surrounding TikTok flash-in-the-pan Hawk Tuah girl , aka Haliey Welch, who sought to parlay her fleeting fame into a cryptocurrency. In December, Welch launched a Hawk Tuah memecoin that shot up to $500 million in market cap—before quickly imploding after it emerged that crooked insiders had rigged the project into a pump-and-dump scheme .

Then there are the ethical and legal concerns surrounding Trump's new memecoin. The surprise launch shot to a $70 billion fully diluted market cap as of Sunday morning and stands to enrich the President-elect and his family enormously, even as the project has shared few details about its future plans or business case. Is blockchain technology destined to reshape the world's financial plumbing, or will it always be resigned to get-rich-quick schemes that end in disastrous fashion?

But for the few hours of celebration, the thorny questions about crypto's future were set aside as guests took in Snoop Dogg's set, which included his own rendition of Journey's Don't Stop Believin'. As the party wrapped up, waiters walked around with trays of macarons and mango cheesecake bites before bringing out one last surprise. It was a Trump favorite: McDonald's hamburgers and french fries.