I have some unsurprising news: Former New York City Mayor Eric Adams launched a memecoin to combat antisemitism, and someone connected to the coin's launch appears to have executed a clean rug pull within an hour of its launch, making off with roughly $1 million, cratering the coin's value. Maybe they felt antisemitism had been solved?
Adams first teased the project just before New Year's, then on Monday announced the launch of NYC Token, which he said is "built to fight the rapid spread of antisemitism and anti-Americanism across this country and now in New York City." In a hype video, a cab driver asks Adams "You got some of that NYC Token?" to which Adams replies, "We'll get you some brother. This thing is about to take off like crazy." He explained further in a characteristically baffling interview with Fox Business, saying the proceeds from the token's sale would be divided equally between the aforementioned initiative, a scholarship fund for underprivileged communities, and crypto education for New York City youths. During the interview, Adams repeatedly referred to it as "block change" technology, complained about the California wealth tax issue, and leapt over the following logical gap:
Let's look at the best use case of blockchain: Walmart. Walmart is using blockchain right now to deal with their tracking of food and tracking of the goods in their stores. It is transparent, anyone can see it, and when you look at this coin, our New York City Coin, the money that is generated from this coin, we're going to zero in on how do we stop this massive increase of antisemitism across our country and across the globe, really, and how do we deal with the increase in anti-Americanism?
With those stated goals, the token launched at 5:30 p.m. ET on Monday at roughly eight cents per token. What followed was predictably parabolic: Within 15 minutes, several wallets connected to the launch bought huge amounts of $NYC, pumping the price to over 50 cents per token. Shortly afterward, they pulled the ripcord, selling off roughly $2.5 million of the token and detonating the value. Those same wallets bought back in to the tune of $1.6 million shortly afterwards in an attempt to re-stabilize the price, though as this is a memecoin, not a real security, the price has flatlined around 13 cents since then. The net result is those launch-connected wallets making off with almost $1 million in pure profit.
Adams insisted before the launch that he wouldn't take a "salary" from the project, which is not how any of this works. The NYC Token team released a statement on Monday night saying that they "rebalanced their liquidity" due to overwhelming demand, which is a slightly oblique way of admitting that they skimmed nearly one million dollars off the top. CoinDesk got a longer statement out of Adams. It didn't really clarify anything.
"After the launch of NYC Token, there was a lot of demand. Our market-maker made adjustments in an attempt to keep trading running smoothly, and as part of this process, moved liquidity," Adams said. "The team has not sold any tokens and are subject to lockups and transfer restrictions. We are focused on being transparent and building for the long term." An NYC Token statement contradicted this the next day, telling the New York Daily News, in all caps, "THE TEAM HAS NOT WITHDRAWN ANY MONEY FROM THE ACCOUNT."
There are two stories being told here. One, told by the paper trail, is that the NYC Token launch was a classic rug pull that netted the token's minters nearly $1 million. Another, by the Adams team, holds that they were simply too stupid to keep other people from pulling that rug. If you know anything about Adams, the two explanations are at least faintly plausible, both separately and together. In both versions, that $1 million got funneled to wallets connected to the launch of the coin.
This makes NYC Token the perfect postscript to Adams' disastrous mayoralty. He has always been a crypto enthusiast, famously taking his first few mayoral paychecks in Bitcoin. I saw him speak at the Bitcoin conference last year. He began by grimly reading off an oath of fealty to Donald Trump in exchange for the president's help with his federal case; then he went off-script to talk about why he likes crypto, which, via his mangled use of a Betsy Ross analogy, boiled down to You guys make a lot of money.
Elected as a Democrat on an anti-crime line, Adams has all but become a Republican who, according to federal prosecutors, used his office to do financial crimes. It's no surprise then that he left Zohran Mamdani's inauguration and went straight to Dubai. Finally free from the shackles of oversight that come with public office, he can now join the global hustler set and cash in on whatever remains of his diminishing, shameful influence.
