Imagine you’re at a carnival.

There’s a stall where you can throw a ring at a bottle and win a goldfish.

Except, instead of a goldfish, you get a dead sardine. And instead of throwing a ring, you just hand over your wallet and someone punches you in the face.

Welcome to the world of memecoin trading.

It’s a neon-lit, sugar-rush-fueled casino where a 13-year-old on a school night can launch a token, rug its investors, make $20k, mock them live on stream…

Then, the next day, a meme about that very rug pull goes viral, and the same investors—still licking their wounds—pile into that coin, hoping for a second chance at glory.

Only to get rug-pulled again.

The Libra Effect

Why… why does this happen?

Well, there’s a basic law of the universe—somewhere between gravity and Murphy’s Law—that states: If you build something powerful, someone will immediately find the dumbest possible way to use it.

If you create a printing press, someone will use it to print pamphlets claiming the moon is full of cheese.

If you create the Internet, someone will turn it into a place where people eat Tide Pods and other people watch them doing it, in real-time, from anywhere in the world.

If you create an immutable blockchain ledger? Someone will use it to permanently record themselves spending $1.7 million on a digital drawing of a rock.

We’ll dub this law the “Libra Effect,” after the latest blowout in the memecoin industrial complex.

Today, we’re going to explain what really happened with Milei’s LIBRA memecoin… why it happened…

(And what happens next.)

The Curse of Libra

At 7 p.m. on Friday, Argentine President Javier Milei announced the token LIBRA on X, sharing its contract address.

He wrote: “This private project will be dedicated to incentivizing the growth of the Argentine economy by funding small businesses and Argentine enterprises. The world wants to invest in Argentina.”

Chaos ensued.

In about a half-hour, LIBRA surged from $0.216 to $5.54.

A trader who bought the moment Milei posted turned $216,000 into $6.5 million.

Yet, at the 40-minute mark, things turned ugly. What looked like a coordinated cashout collapsed the price by 80%.

Crypto sleuths quickly noted that the vast majority of sell-offs came from the development team.

Hayden Davis, a founder of the project, admitted it was true. The team had sold over $100 million in tokens. But he blamed “snipers”—traders who bought early and dumped fast.

His defense? The team was only preemptively pulling liquidity to stabilize the market. They were going to put the money back once the snipers sold. 

(In other words, they rugged before the would-be ruggers rugged.)

But the plan fell apart when Milei deleted his post, sparking a full-blown crash.

Result: 75% of investors lost pretty much everything.

• 8% lost between $1 and $1,000
• 7% lost between $1,000 and $10,000
• 9% lost between $10,000 and $100,000

The biggest winner made $8.5 million. The biggest loser burned $5.25 million.

The fallout tanked Argentina’s stock market by 5.7%, and impeachment threats loomed. Milei went silent, holed up with his inner circle.

But this isn’t a story about Argentina.

It’s a microcosm of the broader, inevitable collision between governments and crypto.

Regulators want control, politicians want credibility, and insiders want money. The result? A chaotic jazz band of misplaced trust, backroom deals, and memecoins getting passed around like hot potatoes.

Meanwhile, the real revolution in blockchain isn’t anywhere near projects like LIBRA…

Behind the Madness

While everyone’s focused on memecoins, something else is happening: the financial system is undergoing a massive software upgrade.

BlackRock, Franklin Templeton, and other financial behemoths are rushing to tokenize assets. Why? Because they know that if they don’t, they’ll end up like the newspaper industry in the 2000s.

We’re talking trillions of dollars of assets—public stocks, private bonds, real estate, commodities—all moving on-chain.

No more 2-day settlements. No more Byzantine banking systems. Everything moves at the speed of the internet.

Indeed, breakthrough technologies always look pretty dumb in the beginning, until they’re embedded into the system. 

Facebook was basically a proto-Tinder for college kids; now, entire economies depend on it.

Cloud computing was mocked as “just someone else’s computer,” now every major enterprise runs on it.

Online dating? It was once seen as desperate and weird. Then, of course, the Internet made everyone desperate and weird.

Now it’s the primary form of dating.

In the next issue of Altucher’s Investment Network, the Altucher team is going to talk about how “insiders” play the game… and how to play it, too. 

In that issue, I’ll reveal where the crypto whales (and BIG MONEY) are headed, what it means for crypto-at-large, and how to play it.

(Hint: it’s not memecoins.)

If you’re an ALN subscriber, be on the lookout.