2025 was the year that defined memecoin culture. It began triumphantly, with billions of dollars in volume surging through hyper-financialized memecoin factories like Pump.fun. It quickly reached a violent crescendo in February when U.S. President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump themselves launched branded memecoins, both of which collapsed more than 90% within months.
This feature is a part of CoinDesk’s Most Influential 2025 list.
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But it wasn’t the president who defined the memecoin movement. It was the archetypal Gen Z supervillain: Hayden Davis.
Davis, a 20-something American whose online persona oscillates between provocateur, self-styled financial “genius,” and unapologetic market manipulator, came to embody everything critics of the memecoin frenzy had been warning about. He was the distillation of a year in which financial nihilism, creator-economy hyper-capitalism and casino-like speculation converged into a single, combustible aesthetic.
For Davis, memecoins weren’t about jokes, culture or community. They were instruments of extraction — vehicles to siphon liquidity from unsuspecting retail traders through methods like sniping, preloading liquidity, insider coordination, and aggressively front-running the very people who believed the memes were real.
In 2025, Davis became both the villain and the avatar of the memecoin era — not because he was the only one deploying these strategies, but because he said the quiet part out loud, again and again, with a level of brazenness that made him impossible to ignore.
The memecoin market has always had its share of tricksters — anonymous whales, pump-and-dump Telegram groups, and algorithmic bots hunting for early launches. But Davis represented something new: a charismatic, camera-friendly operator who embraced the role of antagonist.
Unlike the shadowy insiders who traditionally dominated the memecoin economy, Davis cultivated attention. He boasted during an interview with Coffezilla. He publicly shared strategies most insiders would only discuss behind closed Discord server doors. His persona was part tech-bro, part internet troll, part amateur philosopher. The result was someone who seemed engineered for virality — equal parts outrageous and compelling, someone who could simultaneously attract ridicule, worship and fear.
Where most memecoin participants try to frame their projects as community-driven or ironically artistic, Davis rejected the pretense.
His message: This is a game, and I am playing it better than you.
That message resonated because it was honest, brutally so. And it made Davis a lightning rod for a year already bubbling with public frustration about predatory token launches, celebrity-endorsed rubbish, and the sense that the memecoin boom was less a cultural movement and more a parasitic financial machine feeding on new entrants.
Yet the moment that cemented Davis as one of the defining figures of the year — maybe the defining figure — came with a single, now-infamous token launch.
If the memecoin era needed a symbolic scandal, Libra provided it.
Earlier this year, Davis co-launched “Libra,” a memecoin pitched on the vague idea of aligning with the libertarian, pro-Bitcoin ethos of Argentine President Javier Milei — a political figure adored by parts of crypto-Twitter. What began as a thematically cheeky gamble quickly spiraled into a geopolitical farce.
Davis positioned Libra as a tribute to Milei, leaning into his reputation as the “anarcho-capitalist” leader willing to challenge global monetary orthodoxy. The market bought the narrative — briefly. Milei sensationally shared details about the token on his X account before denouncing it shortly after.
This has widespread ramifications not only across the crypto market, but also deep within Argentine politics.
In February, CoinDesk obtained text messages in which Davis bragged that he could get Milei to do whatever he wanted, claiming that he was in direct contact with the Argentine President’s sister.
“I control that n****,” Davis claimed in text messages from last December, adding “I send $$ to his sister and he signs whatever I saw and does what I want.”
Argentina’s government responded, hinting at potential fraud investigations should Davis or his collaborators continue to link Milei to the token. The scandal instantly incinerated whatever speculative momentum Libra had, turning it from a hype-driven play into a political liability and an embarrassment for Milei.
The fallout would have destroyed most people’s careers in crypto. Not Davis’. Instead, he pivoted into the role of the villain, speaking brazenly in interviews while putting the blame on retail investors, saying the outrage only came from those who were not insiders or “involved in a deal.”
The entire affair became emblematic of memecoin culture in 2025: narratives built on nothing, communities swept into frenzies over ever-thinner storylines, and operators who behaved as though consequences did not exist.
If the goal was to expose how flimsy — and how lucrative — the memecoin meta had become, Libra succeeded.
If Libra made Davis infamous within crypto, his interview with Coffeezilla — the internet’s most prominent fraud investigator — introduced him to a far broader audience.
The interview was astonishing in its openness. Where most crypto scammers deny wrongdoing, Davis often opted to be an open book, in an almost boastful way. He described a memecoin world built on asymmetric information — one where insiders have tools and tactics ordinary people don’t, and where the ethics of exploiting that imbalance barely registered.
Within the interview, Davis made a series of sensational statements. He said that sniping and front-running, both forms of market manipulation, were intellectually justified and that “everyone does it.”
He also used language that likened retail traders as prey, discussing how he captured value from unsuspecting investors while speaking in an entirely casual and calm manner.
One of the most intriguing takeaways of the interview was that Davis reveled in the attention. Far from being defensive, he seemed energized by the platform. He mocked critics. He ridiculed moral objections. He even appeared to enjoy Coffeezilla’s attempts to pin him down.
Shockingly, he framed his behavior as “transparent exploitation.” This is the paradox that made Davis such a compelling villain: he insisted he was being honest by admitting his strategies, and therefore more ethical than the insiders who “pretend to care about community.”
To many viewers, the interview wasn’t just incriminating — it was an unfiltered look at a memecoin ecosystem where traditional notions of responsibility, fairness and disclosure simply did not exist.
And yet, his shamelessness resonated with a certain subsection of crypto youth. Here was someone who rejected hypocrisy, who embraced the idea that the financial system — legacy or crypto — was a rigged game and that the only rational response was to rig it harder.
Whether one finds that stance nihilistic or authentic, it struck a chord with many. And it elevated Davis from memecoin manipulator to cultural phenomenon.
Many thought Davis might run off into the sunset after numerous audacious efforts and extracting maximum value from memecoin launches.
However, that couldn’t be further from the truth and his onchain activity actually suggests activity has ramped up in the final half of this year.
In August, there was the launch of YZY, a memecoin apparently issued by rapper-turned-celebrity car crash Kanye West. Details of the launch were shadowy and no one knew the team behind it — until blockchain data gave everyone a little hint in November.
On Nov. 18, a wallet mysteriously withdrew $17 million worth of tokens from the Libra liquidity pool, presumably Davis extracting some more cash. But things got weirder when $6 million was removed from the YZY liquidity pool, on the exact same day — leading to speculation that Davis was behind yet another celebrity memecoin.
In a testament to Davis’ approach to capital extraction, he claimed a $500 Debridge airdrop in November, showing that even after making hundreds of millions of dollars, he isn’t even leaving a relatively worthless airdrop on the table.
Social media sleuth “dethective” estimates that Davis has made around $300 million from his many memecoin launches.
Davis is influential not because he built anything, innovated technically, or catalyzed a new financial movement. He is influential because he forced the industry to confront its own contradictions.
Crypto has always wrestled with dual identities: a movement driven by idealism and a marketplace driven by greed. In 2024, memecoins exposed that tension more vividly than ever — and Davis held up a mirror to that reality, with none of the comforting narrative sugar-coating.
He represents financial nihilism of a generation shut out of traditional wealth pathways, with memecoins becoming lottery tickets for young traders who feel alienated from stocks, housing and stable careers.
To some, Davis is a warning sign: a symbol of an industry drifting too far into speculation and predation. To others, he’s simply the product of the system as it exists — a player maximizing incentives that millions of traders willingly participate in.
Either way, ignoring him is impossible.
This was the year memecoins crossed into the political mainstream, the celebrity economy, and even global geopolitics. It was the year where $5 tokens with anime mascots briefly became billion-dollar assets, and where a misjudged meme launch could spark legal outrage from a head of state.
And through it all stood Hayden Davis, the dark star around which much of the chaos orbited.