PolitiFi parodies are half-way to the US election — but it’s uphill from here

It’s a long road ahead to the US election in November, something of which holders of political parody memecoins are likely all too aware.

Tokens like boden, tremp and more recently kama are a genre all to themselves. They caught fire earlier in the year, an extension of the memecoin mania that largely gripped Solana and Base.

“PolitiFi,” as it’s come to be known, is a catch-all term for memecoins and social tokens with a political bent. They’re usually named after a politician or pundit.

A subset of those tokens has its own nomenclature and art style — misspellings of names and rough, MS-Paint-style caricatures of their respective figures. 

Joe Biden isn’t Joe Biden, he’s jeo boden. Donald Trump is doland tremp, and Tucker Carlson is tooker kurlson.

As for which came first, tremp and boden both launched in late February to early March. As a cohort, parody political memecoins hit close to $800 million market cap in about one month. But they’ve been bleeding out ever since, and are now worth less than $100 million overall.

When the first parodies launched, there was about 250 days until the election. Now, there’s 124 days to go, putting this particular brand of PolitiFi right at the half-way point.

Vice president Kamala Harris’ parody coin, kamala horris, is the latest to pump following Biden’s wobbly debate performance last week.

Read more: Biden debate performance shakes up Polymarket odds

KAMA was actually launched at the end of March but only recently picked up steam, going from $1.4 million market cap before the debate to $11.4 million — 8x gains.

Still, KAMA makes up only 3% of the parody memecoin space. Boden currently holds 24% market share, down from 60% in May, while tremp has 43%, up from under 10% also in May.

(Interestingly, there doesn’t appear to be much holder overlap between parody coins. After comparing blockchain data for the different tokens, boden and tremp had the highest similarity with 12.6% of addresses holding both. Tooker and tremp’s similarity is 3.6%, while just 1% of kama and boden holders currently have both tokens.

Memecoins are super volatile and there’s no reason to suspect otherwise of these political parodies. They’ll likely go up and down ad nauseam, as is practically intended.

Although, we’re still about four months away from the US election in November. With so much room left to go, holders intent on riding out the campaigns would be wise to strap in for the long haul.

Start your day with top crypto insights from David Canellis and Katherine Ross. Subscribe to the Empire newsletter .

Explore the growing intersection between crypto, macroeconomics, policy and finance with Ben Strack, Casey Wagner and Felix Jauvin. Subscribe to the On the Margin newsletter .

The Lightspeed newsletter is all things Solana, in your inbox, every day. Subscribe to daily Solana news from Jack Kubinec and Jeff Albus.