Over the weekend and into early Monday, the blockchain trenches were filled with sadness as President Trump’s trade war stifled the market for some unwary investors.
Many popular meme coins have plummeted over the past week, with Official Trump ( TRUMP), Dogwifhat ( WIF), Pudgy Penguins ( PENGU), and ai16z ( AI16Z ) all showing at least 20 % losses—and those losses were much worse earlier Monday.
As of this writing, Dogecoin‘s rate has climbed 10 % to almost$ 0.29 over the past 24 hours—yet the cat crypto has also lost a significant part of its post-election increases over the past month. On Election Day, Dogecoin traded hands as high as$ 0.20, leaping to a three-year high of$ 0.48 in the weeks thereafter.
Before bouncing again Monday, Expand nearly touched a value of$ 0.21 on Sunday night—a almost three-month lower, and a massive drop from that new high. It’s also over 12 % on the week, even after the restoration.
While Trump’s decision to impose levies on Canada, Mexico, and China sent shockwaves rippling across broader industry, a joke gold selloff has been more marked, as investors toward the farthest end of crypto’s chance curve show signs of weariness.
As Trump revealed delays in the tariffs for Mexico and Canada amid negotiations with each neighbor’s leaders, some of the largest cryptocurrencies ( like Dogecoin ) have recovered significantly over the course of Monday. However, many meme coins have been steadily losing value in recent days.
According to Matt Mena, a crypto research strategist at the asset manager 21Shares, the crypto market was particularly affected this weekend because digital assets traded 24/7, a dynamic that allows institutions to leverage their existing positions to immediately access liquidity.
Mena wrote in a Monday note that” this effect is particularly pronounced on weekends when traditional markets are closed, frequently leading to exaggerated price movements in crypto.”
According to Austin King, co-founder of Omni Network, an abstraction layer for Ethereum scaling networks, meme coins trade mostly on social media chatter and favorable macroeconomic conditions that make them successful.
Many projects are effectively finding themselves on the losing end of a competition for mind share with the president, he said, given Trump’s ability to command a news cycle. If the tariffs lead to a prolonged risk-off environment, King added that meme coins may suffer more.
As threats of a global trade war emerge from the world’s largest economy, he said,” Most investors are going to be less interested with high-risk, speculative assets like meme coins.” As investors flee to lower risk assets, “meme coins will experience a decrease in liquidity.”
As tariffs contribute to an investor’s preference for a risk-off approach, King added that successfully launching a meme coin today has become much more challenging than it was a few months ago.
On the Solana-based application Pump. Fun, where users have strewn over an abundance of meme coins over the past year, appeared subdued as a result. The platform’s total volume had dropped to$ 193 million on Sunday, falling 39 % from a week prior, according to a Dune dashboard.
The Friday selloff that was sparked by the tariffs came as many meme coins were just taking a break from a punishing stretch. China’s surprise DeepSeek AI launch punished well-known names as tech stocks fell a week ago as a result of numerous new memes that are all about artificial intelligence.
The president’s meme coin, launched last month, had already created rocky conditions for tokens lacking utility, according to GSR Research Analyst Toe Bautista. Most meme coins fell 50 % in price, he told , as TRUMP initially became a popular trade.
He claimed that the launch of the Trump meme coin caused a significant liquidity drain, causing other meme coins to lose money. ” As broader market instability increased, liquidity continued to dry up and could no longer support existing meme coin valuations, let alone new contenders”.
Meme coins previously experienced turbulence, but Bautista thinks that Trump’s trade war may have tipped the market even more after an already turbulent stretch.
” With on-chain liquidity already stretched”, he said,” the combination of macro uncertainty—tariffs, DeepSeek’s developments, and broader equity volatility—has sent meme coin markets into free-fall”.
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