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 launch his very own memecoin. Around the end of Snoop’s set, the Trump coin had crossed a market cap of $1 billion, a fitting climax to a first-of-its-kind inauguration party titled the Crypto Ball.
For the guests at Friday’s black-tie affair, hosted at the neoclassical Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium just blocks from the White House, the party was a victory lap. After years of pariah status under a hostile Biden Administration, the industry waged a successful political campaign to elect crypto-friendly politicians, including President-elect Trump. Now, the industry is enjoying a once-unimaginable level of power and respect in Washington, D.C.
Tickets for the gala ranged from $2,500 to $1 million, with two separate tiered VIP rooms, including a balcony overlooking the crowd, leading several attendees to whisper that it felt “like the ‘Hunger Games.'”
Trump did not attend the Crypto Ball, but many of his important allies made an appearance, including the Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson (R-La.), and—fitting for an industry built on a new form of money—Treasury Secretary nominee Scott Bessent and Commerce Secretary nominee Howard Lutnick.
The new political royalty rubbed shoulders with their counterparts in the crypto sector, including Coinbase founder Brian Armstrong, Gemini cofounders Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, and MicroStrategy cofounder Michael Saylor. Special guests included Tigran Gambaryan, the star IRS crypto investigator-turned-Binance executive who spent eight months detained in Nigerian prison before the Biden administration secured his release.
“The reign of terror against crypto is over,” venture capitalist and incoming Crypto and AI czar David Sacks told the assembled crowd. “The beginning of innovation in America for crypto has just begun.”
The overall mood was ebullient as the audience took in performances not just from Snoop Dogg but also Rick Ross and Soulja Boy, who performed his classic “Crank That” to end the night. At the same time, the first Crypto Ball produced quiet unease as the blockchain crowd—an industry born out of the radical anti-government philosophy of 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.
