During his latest manic Nazi posting spree earlier this month, Kanye West shared a screenshot of what he claimed was an offer of $2 million to promote a crypto pump-and-dump operation. The proposed deal said that Kanye would write a post promoting “a fake ye currency”—a memecoin, also known as a shitcoin—and after eight hours, he would be allowed to post that his account was hacked and that the promotion was fake.
In the meantime, Ye’s endorsement would have spiked the token’s price, allowing insiders to dump their holdings on hapless speculators, who would presumably pour in to buy up the rapidly depreciating tokens. As if to put a point on it, Kanye’s contact added, “The company asking you to do this will be scamming the public out of tens of millions of dollars.”
Whether the offer was real or not, it reflects a standard deal of a kind that’s executed sub rosa every day in the scamming-as-a-service crypto economy. A variation on this grim script played out last week when Argentinian President Javier Milei promoted a crypto token—an essentially worthless shitcoin—as a get-rich-quick opportunity for his countrymen, only to delete his post and attempt to distance himself from the project.
“I was not informed of the fine details of the project and after learning, I decided not to continue spreading it (that’s why I deleted the tweet),” wrote Milei.
The Buenos Aires Herald compared Milei to Pontius Pilate, claiming ignorance of the crimes he blessed, although Milei offered a grubbier excuse. “If you go to a casino and lose money, what’s there to complain about when you knew the risks? I didn’t promote it, I merely shared it,” Milei said. “It’s like playing Russian roulette and getting the bullet.”
Milei’s post had touted the token, $LIBRA, which was spun up hours earlier on a platform associated with crypto scammers, as “dedicated to boosting the growth of the Argentinian economy by funding small businesses and entrepreneurs.” As in every grift of this type, most investors lost their money—hundreds of millions of dollars, according to some blockchain analysts. To use the crypto-scammers’ term of art, President Javier Milei rug-pulled his country.
As the coin’s free fall kicked in, Milei doubled down—in a brazen act of stupidity, greed, or defiance. He continued to defend himself as merely a good-faith believer in the token. On X, Milei reshared a post promoting $LIBRA (unless that, too, was another deception perpetrated against Argentina’s hapless anarcho-capitalist president). One observer said that he found insiders’ wallets trading $LIBRA in sync with Milei’s repost.
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The murkiness, the layers of deniability, the claims of misrepresentation, and the “oh no, I was fooled” protestations are all part of the charade. Zach Witkoff, son of Trump Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff and a cofounder of Trump’s World Liberty Financial crypto company, recently claimed to be the victim of an X hack, which took over his account to promote a Barron Trump–themed shitcoin. In due course, Witkoff’s account was restored to his control—thanks, he wrote in a post, to the intervention of James Musk (Elon’s cousin) and several crypto executives.
This kind of vulgar grifterism might be tolerated in a figure like the current president of the United States—responsible for promoting both the $TRUMP and $MELANIA shitcoins that rocketed up in investor value before plummeting rudely back to earth a few days later, after Trump and his allies had potentially realized hundreds of millions of dollars in profit. But the people and opposition politicians of Argentina are less forgiving. Milei now faces potential fraud charges and calls for his impeachment. On Monday, markets saw a sell-off in Argentina’s government bonds. Former Argentinian president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner wrote on X that Milei was a “CRYPTO SCAMMER.” Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum described the situation as “extremely serious if confirmed.” A muscled young crypto influencer named “Ape” posted shirtless videos of himself screaming about his $LIBRA losses, smashing objects in his home, and vowing to hunt down Milei and the project developers. He then, in classic crypto-grift fashion, asked fans to join his Telegram channel and support other tokens he partnered with.
Despite his pleas of naïveté, this wasn’t Milei’s first crypto scam. When Milei ran for president in 2023, he was being sued for his part in promoting CoinX, a trading platform that promised to use sophisticated automated trading software to produce guaranteed profits. On Instagram, Milei posted a photo—which is still up—of himself visiting the CoinX offices. “They are revolutionizing the way of investing to help Argentines escape inflation,” Milei wrote. After customers filed complaints over CoinX’s failure to deliver its promised returns, Argentinian regulators shut down the company.
Based on this earlier foray into crypto markets, it’s reasonable to say that, whatever financial interest he may or may not have had in $LIBRA, Milei knew what he was doing. Providing further confirmation was an interview produced by Coffeezilla, an accomplished crypto sleuth who posts lengthy fraud investigations on YouTube, with Hayden Davis, one of $LIBRA’s creators (though Davis claimed he wasn’t part of the core team of developers). The interview revealed not only the obvious scam at the heart of $LIBRA; it also connected the presidential shitcoin to a network of pump-and-dump practitioners offering shitcoin services to famous people around the world, including Melania Trump.
In their hour-long conversation, Davis fretted about the $100 million worth of $LIBRA tokens he still held, the threats he and his family were facing in the wake of its collapse, and his belief that no one was taking accountability for this debacle. He all but confirmed Milei’s close participation in the project. Evincing a black-pilled crypto cynicism, he also made it clear that the $LIBRA project wasn’t unusual. “I think this is what happens in all memecoins ever,” said Davis. Remarkably, he then disclosed that he was involved in the $MELANIA memecoin project, which was promoted by Melania and Donald Trump the weekend before the presidential inauguration. It seems that presidential shitcoins are becoming standard tools for greedy kleptocrats—and Davis and others are rising to the occasion to provide their behind-the-scenes services.
Davis went on to talk about the rampant market manipulation in memecoins and how savvy traders—including, apparently, some of his partners—are able to “game” token launches and “snipe” supplies of newly released tokens before average speculators can get to them. The speculators then have to buy from the whales, insiders, scammers, and other big holders. That’s when the dump comes, and when the token price inevitably crashes.
In the interview, Coffeezilla observed that a lot of crypto-manipulation sounds like a zero-sum game with no way for legitimate value to be made.
Davis didn’t disagree. “Even at the top, all of it is extractive to some degree or a zero-sum game,” he said. “None of it has value. Whether it’s a fucking memecoin or it’s a giant utility project, it all is dogshit.”
Coffeezilla looked stunned. Here was his interview subject repeatedly saying that he was pushing digital garbage in a rigged market, that everyone was doing it, and that there was essentially no way to turn this scheme into an honest, productive economic activity—though Davis said he was desperately trying to clean up after the fiasco. Would this admission change anything? Probably not. In crypto, confessions are everywhere. What matters most to market players is a simple question of timing: When the next memecoin launches, will you be one of the insiders secretly profiting? Or will you be another normie loser watching all that money disappear at the casino?
