The immediate post-term activities of a New York City mayor are historically pretty private, quiet, and nondescript. That is, of course, unless you’re Eric Adams, a man who has never been described as any one of those three words. Not even two weeks since packing it up at Gracie Mansion and handing Zohran Mamdani the keys to his haunted former residence, Adams, the city’s first “crypto mayor,” doubled down on his commitment to the speculative, prone-to-tampering digital currency market by announcing his own coin on Monday night.
The “$NYC” token, as unveiled in a press conference on January 11 in Times Square, was supposedly created to “combat antisemitism” and provide blockchain education in ways neither he nor his partners in the venture have effectively explained. But the math of what happens next is just as blurry.
Hours after the press event (during which Adams wore a hat and clutched a sign with the coin’s logo), the token launched, investors flooded in (some throwing five and six-figure bags in), and sent the coin’s total valuation to roughly $600 million at one point, or about 50 cents per coin, Fortune reports. As it climbed, the wallets associated with some of the biggest investments from just moments prior began withdrawing their freshly pumped coins for real money or more credible crypto, and promptly, predictably, sent the price of the token off a cliff. One investor managed to turn $81,000 into $250,000, another pulled out $736,000 from $250,000, according to Hell Gate.
When it was all said and done, $2.5 million had been withdrawn by those wallets, $1.6 million had been reinvested into the coin, which left about $900,000 in net profit unaccounted for. Almost instantly, bulls and bears alike called foul, some accusing the former mayor of pocketing the cash in a fairly conventional “rug-pull” scenario (think of any time you’ve heard someone complain about losing money on a memecoin over the last five or six years), which has become a stunningly reliable grift for both sitting and now retired politicians.
In his defense, Adams claimed the crash was due to high demand. “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,” he told Coin Desk on Tuesday morning, when the coin had already lost 60% of its value. Yet he insists, “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.”
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