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It did not take long for former mayor Eric Adams to dive deeper into a specific post-government-duty pet project. Just days after his return to the U.S. from a quick trip to Dubai — where he hung out with a cosmetic vaginoplasty expert who Adams says taught him about “stem cell” — he was back in New York City to talk about his new cryptocurrency.
In an interview with Fox Business early on Monday morning, Adams launched a token called New York City Coin ($NYC). Speaking with Maria Bartiromo, Adams said the main reason he was launching this coin was to promote the use of cryptocurrency in New York. It would also fund three separate initiatives: antisemitism awareness and education, “crypto education for New York City youth,” and scholarship opportunities for the aforementioned crypto-educated youth.
For a politician who has been boosting crypto for years now, Adams did not display a detailed understanding of how it works; in his interview with Bartiromo, he said the word “blockchange” twice. But he does appear to grasp what many token founders understand about launching a new coin: It can be money for the taking.
About 30 minutes after the launch of his coin, crypto observers on X found that Adams’s team pulled his substantial share of $NYC coin from the market just as its value was rising. This is known in crypto as a rug pull: A person with a public platform announces a coin and uses some early hype to get others to buy in, then the insiders pull their liquidity first, extracting some actual value while other investors are left holding a useless token. It is not technically illegal.
The total market cap of $NYC coin soared to around $100 million in its first 30 minutes. That’s when a wallet connected to the coin’s issuer pulled out most of its share, worth as much as $3.5 million. This rug pull joins a murderer’s row of infamous meme-coin collapses over the past few years, including for coins connected to Melania Trump, Squid Game, and Haliey Welch.
If Adams does have access to the $3.5 million, it would be an excellent pay day for a guy with a lot of legal bills; as of October, he owed $4.5 million in attorneys’ fees related to his federal criminal case dropped last year. Either way, he did deliver promptly on his use case of $NYC as crypto education — the lesson being “Don’t put your money in stuff like this.”