This Week on Crypto Twitter: Fantasy Top Tops the Charts, Trump Courts Crypto

This week, a gamified competition among Crypto Twitter influencers generated a frenzy of posts and millions in profits while major public figures like Tom Brady and Donald Trump waded back into crypto waters. 

Fantasy Top—an Ethereum NFT game that pits social media fan bases against each other in a fantasy football-like competition—made waves this week as tribes of Crypto Twitter users furiously commented and reposted to support their chosen influencers. The game paid out $1.25 million to creators this week, plus potentially millions more in Blast Gold, as a cut of the game’s success. 

As the first round of the game concluded this week, influencers took victory laps alongside their followers; several accounts shared their bounties with the fans who pushed them over the top.  

While most of the buzz surrounding Fantasy Top was positive, given its incredible profitability, others were more skeptical given the long history of “SocialFi” projects with no apparent use case other than generating speculative interest, which typically collapse after stalling.

Meanwhile, in the real world, Tom Brady caught some rough jokes at his Netflix roast earlier this week over his current commitment to crypto and former ties to the failed FTX exchange. Many crypto users still welcomed the brief mainstream moment in the spotlight as a sign that crypto can still climb higher.

The biggest mainstream news to impact crypto came on Wednesday, however, when former president Donald Trump hosted a dinner party for holders of his NFTs at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. 

At the gathering, Trump declared his intent to embrace crypto in the United States if re-elected, sending many crypto users into a frenzy. 

At the same event, another NFT holder asked Trump about BODEN, a meme coin mocking President Joe Biden. Simply by making a quip about it—saying he didn’t think the coin sounded like a good investment—BODEN surged the following day.

Remarkably, users of the crypto betting site Polymarket had already waged nearly $100,000 on whether Trump would reference the coin by July. But read the fine print: Trump had to say the word ‘Boden,’ which he failed to. So close, yet so far. 

For all the frivolity, Trump's event was a stark contrast to Pres. Joe Biden backing the SEC at the start of the week, and many commentators saw a serious election wedge issue developing. “Crypto voters will be heard this election,” former TIME president and Bloomberg global chief revenue officer and current MoonPay exec Keith Grossman tweeted. “What is really needed is not division but rather a clear regulatory framework that is NOT politicized.”

Edited by Ryan Ozawa. This article has been updated to correct Keith Grossman's past and current positions.