In the aftermath of right-wing youth activist Charlie Kirk's assassination at Utah Valley University in Orem, the cryptocurrency world leapt into action by scrambling to profit from it.
According to Bloomberg News, "Minutes after Kirk was shot, tokens associated with him started to appear: 'Pray For Kirk Coin,' 'DEAD KIRK' and 'Charlie Kirk’s dog,' among dozens of others. While many of the coins’ creators pitched the tokens as memorials to Kirk or sources of charity for his family, each was fundamentally an attempt to turn Kirk’s death into profit."
Since the shooting, more than 10,000 new crypto tokens have been launched that include the names "Charlie" and/or "Kirk," according to a review of data.
"Within an hour of the shooting, one Kirk token reached a market capitalization of $16 million," noted the report. "By that evening, creators of Kirk coins had already collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in transaction fees on the Solana blockchain. On X, many crypto traders and influencers chided their fellow 'degens' — a half-pejorative, half-affectionate term short for 'degenerate gambler' — for making money from Kirk’s death."
One crypto trader in Florida, Evan Rademaker, told Bloomberg he bought $30,000 worth of "RIP Charlie Kirk" coin, sold it at a $17,000 loss after it plummeted, then bought more after another surge, only to lose money a second time.
Many critics argue that such "memecoins," as they are called, are used as little more than old-school pump-and-dump fraud schemes. The Trump family has recently come under fire for their own forays into issuing crypto tokens, from a Trump memecoin used to give away access to a dinner with the president, to a venture called World Liberty Financial, co-founded by Trump's children that has reportedly netted the family billions of dollars, much of it from foreign entities.