President Donald Trump’s return to the White House has been seen by many as a boost for cryptocurrency. During the campaign, he made several crypto-friendly pledges and recently made a splash when he launched his own “meme coin” shortly before the inauguration.

The Trump token reached a nearly a $15 billion valuation, though it has since fallen quite a bit. But it continues to provoke questions, like, is creating this investment vehicle a conflict of interest for a high-ranking official? And what the heck is a meme coin anyway?

Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Axios reporter Brady Dale, author of the Axios Crypto newsletter, to get some answers.

The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

Brady Dale: They’re a speculative instrument that, I sort of view them as a game. You know, there are these cryptocurrencies that capture an idea. So the most famous one is dogecoin — that funny dog that everyone sees all over the internet — and then, you know, these days there’s this blockchain called Solana that’s very fast and easy to use and cheap to use. And this app was spun up called pump.fun that made it very easy to just create new meme coins, like super, superfast. And so thousands get created every day. And it’s just a game where people, you know, watch the new ones come out and ask themselves, which of these ideas is the funniest, which of these ideas is the catchiest? And they buy some, you know, making a bet that they can pick it correctly. And then, you know, these coins typically don’t last very long. Sometimes they do, but typically they don’t. And so you’re trying to, like, guess which ones will grab everyone’s attention. If it does start to go up, you try to sell at the right time because you sort of assume it’s not going to last forever. So it’s this big, massive gambling game that people are playing together because right now, in crypto there’s nothing else really interesting to do other than buying bitcoin, because bitcoin has had a good year or so, but that’s not that exciting. And so people are looking for, you know, people in this space like fun stuff to play around with. And so that’s been meme coins for the last many months.

Meghan McCarty Carino: All right, and we’re discussing this now, of course, because of President Trump’s meme coin, which he launched the weekend before the inauguration. How did that go?

Dale: Well, it really exploded. At first, a handful of people made a ton of money off of it. A bunch of other people made a little, tiny amount of money off of it. And, you know, some others lost money. It’s way down from its high price. But one thing I will say is this meme coin would fall into the category of what we sometimes call celebrity meme coins. And there’s been a lot of celebrity crypto products. Those have the potential to have more staying power because, like the celebrity — in this case, the most powerful man in the world — can, if they choose, do things around those coins to, like, keep driving interest to them. He could start saying that, like, there’s a special section at my rallies for, you know, Trumpcoin holders. Who knows if he’ll do that? He may never talk about it again. It may be a totally dead thing, but if he did, that kind of thing would continue to drive interest in it.

McCarty Carino: Yeah. Tell me more about these celebrity coins because there have been a number of them and a number of kind of scandals around them in the last year or so.

Dale: Yeah, generally speaking, when celebrities get involved in cryptocurrency, it doesn’t go well, you know? It’s been mostly something that kind of C-list or has-been celebrities have done, you know, honestly. And so it’s tough for them to drive ongoing interest, since people don’t have ongoing interest in them. But obviously, you know, no one is able to drive ongoing interest like President Trump. So this coin could be different. I’m not banking on it, but it could be different.

McCarty Carino: I mean, you did report that a lot of the people buying the Trump meme coin were largely new to crypto.

Dale: Yeah, because I think, you know, the app that they used at launch, called Moonshot, said it onboarded 400,000 people, and you know, probably most of them were people who had never touched a blockchain before. I think a lot of people saw it and assumed it was Trump and so probably the price would go up quickly and think maybe they could make some money. But I think some people thought it gave legitimacy to the sector. I mean, here is the [then] about-to-be president, now the president, launching a cryptocurrency, so maybe that actually meant something. Now, the weird thing is, it’s hard to see how much this actually came from Trump himself. You know, he was asked about it by some reporters, and he said he didn’t know much about it, which, you know, who knows if that’s true or not? But what is true is, I think when it launched, a lot of us were expecting him to promote it in some way during his inauguration time, and he didn’t say anything about it. He still hasn’t, you know. So there’s been something that [Trump’s son] Barron did that he wasn’t paying much attention to, which is unclear.

McCarty Carino: So how has the crypto industry been responding to these official presidential meme coins?

Dale: Yeah, I would say the people who’ve been around for a long time, the more sober crypto people, you know, those folks do exist, haven’t been that excited about it because they feel like the president launching a cryptocurrency undermines his kind of, you know, authority and his credibility as someone to move pro-crypto regulation. So they haven’t been that psyched about it, but that the newer folks, like, for example, I talked to one of the co-founders of pump.fun, you know, the guys who got the whole meme coin thing going in the last year. They’re extremely excited about this, you know? Like, obviously, it’s been great for them and their sector. It’s been great for the blockchain they build on, Solana, but I think by and large, the energy from Trumpcoin has kind of died off. We haven’t seen them putting more into it. So I think folks are largely disappointed and sort of not feeling great about this happening. But it also, the president is so powerful right now, it probably isn’t really going to mean much, one way or the other, for the industry, really, in the grand scheme of things.

McCarty Carino: And what can investors do with these coins?

Dale: Bet that they’ll go up or down? I mean, that’s, that’s all. That’s the only function they have so far. You know, the Trump Organization could introduce more functions for them, but right now, it’s purely speculative. Now this might be of interest to your listeners. This is hardly the first Trump meme coin. There’s been a ton of Trump meme coins. It’s just that this is the first official Trump meme coin. And the reason that’s important is there were lots of Trump meme coins trading during the election. There were also Biden coins, there was Kamala coins, there was, you know, RFK coins, like whatever, you name it. But these were just things that people made, some as more serious efforts than others. But what is interesting about those coins is they did go up and down with, like, the polls and the news and the election. So if Trump looked like he was doing better than Biden, the Trumpcoins would go up in value. When [then-Vice President Kamala Harris] first became clear that she was going to be the Democratic nominee, her meme coin really shot up in price, like a ton, you know. Went from like, next to nothing to, you know, something. You could have made a lot of money if you’d had some of those. So they really do follow the news. That is how folks trade them. So, I mean, it could be that people will buy into these things and sort of, you know, make bets around moves that Trump makes, and what that might do to his price, the price of his coin and probably, if what we saw in the election is true, this coin will follow big news moments in his presidency.

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On the crypto regulation front, Trump has already created a group focused on, among other things, the creation of a national cryptocurrency reserve, which could come from crypto seized by the federal government.

Meanwhile, Trump Media — the parent company of Truth Social, also majority owned by the president — recently announced it was planning to offer its own financial services, specifically investments like exchange-traded funds and, yes, cryptocurrencies.

Back to that question of what you can do with a Trump meme coin: Several e-commerce sites have announced they will accept it as a form of payment. So you can now buy Trump watches, Trump sneakers and Trump fragrances with Trumpcoin.

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Trump renews interest in crypto “meme coins”