The crypto trenches were lined with disappointment over the weekend and into early Monday, as President Trump’s trade war nuked the chart for many unsuspecting traders.
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 price has climbed 10% to nearly $0.29 over the past 24 hours—yet the canine crypto has still lost a significant chunk of its post-election gains over the past fortnight. 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 back Monday, DOGE nearly touched a price of $0.21 on Sunday night—a nearly three-month low, and a massive dip from that recent high. It’s still down 12% on the week, even after the revival.
While Trump’s decision to impose tariffs on Canada, Mexico, and China sent shockwaves rippling across broader markets, a meme coin selloff has been more pronounced, as investors toward the farthest end of crypto’s risk curve exhibit signs of weariness.
Some of the largest cryptocurrencies (like Dogecoin) have rebounded substantially over the course of Monday as Trump revealed delays to the tariffs for Mexico and Canada amid negotiations with each neighbor’s leaders, but many meme coins are still showing dramatic losses in recent days.
The crypto market fell particularly hard this weekend because digital assets trade 24/7, a dynamic allowing institutions to tap their existing positions to access liquidity instantly, according to Matt Mena, a crypto research strategist at the asset manager 21Shares.
“This effect is particularly pronounced on weekends when traditional markets are closed, often leading to exaggerated price moves in crypto,” Mena wrote in a Monday note.
Meme coins trade on little more than vibes, subsisting largely off the social media chatter and the favorable macroeconomic conditions that let them thrive, Austin King, the co-founder of Omni Network, a so-called abstraction layer for Ethereum scaling networks, told Decrypt.
Given Trump’s ability to command a news cycle, many projects are effectively finding themselves on the losing end of a competition for mind share with the president, he said. If the tariffs lead to a prolonged risk-off environment, King added that meme coins may suffer more.
“Most investors are going to be less interested with high-risk, speculative assets like meme coins as threats of a global trade war emerge from the world’s largest economy,” he said. “Meme coins are going to see a decrease in liquidity as investors flee to lower risk assets.”
As tariffs contribute to a risk-off approach among investors, King added that successfully launching a meme coin today has grown much more difficult than it was a few months ago.
On the Solana-based application Pump.fun, where users have unleashed an avalanche of meme coins over the past year, meme coin mania appeared subdued. The platform’s total volume had dropped to $193 million on Sunday, falling 39% from a week prior, according to a Dune dashboard.
The tariff-sparked selloff that began on Friday came as many meme coins were just starting to catch a break after a punishing stretch. With many new meme coins themed around artificial intelligence, China’s surprise DeepSeek AI launch punished popular names as tech stocks sank a week ago.
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 Decrypt, as TRUMP initially became a popular trade.
“The launch of the Trump meme coin created a significant liquidity drain, pulling capital away from other meme coins,” he said. “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 faced headwinds before, but Bautista believes that Trump’s trade war may have tipped the market even more following an already tumultuous 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.”
Edited by Andrew Hayward
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