The team behind TRUMP (the meme coin, not the former US president) has a similar complaint to the namesake of their Crypto token: they say the game is rigged against them.
The team, which has no official ties to Donald Trump, told CoinDesk that they have found it difficult to get the original Trump-themed PoliFi token appear on major digital asset trading platforms.
TRUMP, whose logo features the Republican candidate with laser eyes, primarily trades on decentralized exchanges (DEX), but is available on lesser-known centralized exchanges, including MEXC, LBank, BingX, and BitMart.
However, when the team applied in mid-May to list the token on Kraken, ONE of the largest and oldest US exchanges, they never received a response, Steven Steele, director of marketing for the TRUMP token, told CoinDesk in a Telegram message. A Kraken spokesperson had no comment.
“Exchanges that have refused to list TRUMP for ‘political reasons’ are exhibiting shameful levels of cowardice that are also incredibly tone-deaf to the current memecoin landscape and their own customers,” Steele said.
“Avoid the PoliFi pioneer because it is a Trump-themed project in an election season in which he is openly running as the first major presidential ‘Crypto’ of America is surprisingly out of touch and says a lot about who they are and where they are. coming,” she continued.
PoliFi refers to Political Finance, an election-themed memecoin category where ownership represents partisanship (though again, not formal affiliation), and the market movement of a token reflects a candidate’s chances of winning.
Despite Kraken’s apparent refusal to list TRUMP, a prankster counterpart, TREMP, recently debuted on the US stock market. In addition to Kraken, TREMP is also listed on HTX in addition to many of the lesser-known exchanges that include TRUMP.
Kraken also lists BODEN, TREMP’s JOE Biden-themed counterpart.
Other exchanges told the TRUMP team that the token was “too political” to list, even though they initially appeared to be okay with it, as long as certain volume targets were met before listing.
In screenshots seen by CoinDesk, a representative of ByBit’s listing team initially provided volume targets as a prerequisite for listing the token on the exchange.
However, that REP later said that the exchange’s management rejected the listing due to the potential political risk it could bring to a centralized exchange.
A ByBit spokesperson declined to discuss the matter officially.
OKX also gave Team TRUMP a similar response. In screenshots seen by CoinDesk, a member of its listing team said political meme coins were too sensitive a topic to list.
An OKX spokesperson declined to discuss the listing decisions when contacted by CoinDesk.
The TRUMP team has not yet applied to be listed on HTX, the only other major exchange besides Kraken that lists the TREMP token. An HTX spokesperson did not rule out including TRUMP when asked by CoinDesk.
“We consider every potential project and token for listing on our platform, subject to the market environment and trend,” an HTX spokesperson told CoinDesk in a Telegram interview. “And to be fair to each project, there is also a strict evaluation process by our listing committee.”
All PoliFi tokens are deep in the red following the launch of DJT, another Trump-themed token that some have claimed is officially supported by the former president’s campaign (although no definitive proof has been provided).
Crypto trader GiganticRebirth, once a ranking champion on FTX, broke a year-and-a-half hiatus from tweeting to question the connection between the token and the campaign by offering himself as a counterparty in a bet by convicted pharmaceutical executive Martin Shkreli.
The bettors on Polymarket the cryptocurrency-based prediction market platform, are pointing to a 16% chance that the DJT token will be endorsed by Trump himself or his campaign.
