The New York Times revealed: $300,000 gilded Trump statue, just to hype a Meme coin!
This sounds like an absurd play, but The New York Times reported it: a group of cryptocurrency investors spent $300,000 to create a 15-foot tall gilded Trump statue called "Don Colossus," covered in gold leaf and with a 7,000-pound base, just to promote a Meme coin called PATRIOT!
The photo of Trump raising his fist after the 2024 assassination attempt went viral, and they immediately contacted Ohio sculptor Alan Cottrill to create the statue, even requesting to "remove the neck fat and slim down the figure" to make a perfect version of Trump.
After the statue was completed, they went crazy posting progress pictures on X, trying to attract Trump insiders, such as Pastor Mark Burns (Trump's "spiritual advisor"), and even sent the gilded photos to Trump himself. Old Trump replied, "This statue looks amazing!"
The plan was even bolder: they wanted to place the statue directly at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago golf resort in Florida (a concrete base has already been built), and even hoped to have Trump himself unveil it!
Meanwhile, the PATRIOT coin is set to launch at the end of 2024, coinciding with Trump’s call to "make America the global cryptocurrency capital," with the coin price soaring as investors poured money into creating the statue, exchanging for large amounts of tokens, clearly trying to leverage Trump’s popularity to pump the price.
And what happened? A complete mess.
First, Trump himself launched the official Meme coin TRUMP, and once the main character stepped in, PATRIOT was instantly overshadowed, with its price plummeting over 90%, nearly to zero.
Secondly, chaos erupted within the project: sculptor Cottrill claimed investors owed him $75,000-$90,000 in royalties and final payments, angrily stating, "If the money isn’t paid, the statue will never leave my factory!"
One person from the project even replied, "Yeah haha, we planned to use the statue to hype the coin from the start." In the end, after the White House and Trump Organization were questioned by the media, Eric Trump quickly tweeted to clarify: "We had nothing to do with this coin!
This incident is essentially a classic operation in the crypto world: using super bold offline marketing (a giant gilded statue) to create buzz, tying it to a political figure, and creating a false appearance of "official endorsement" to pump up the coin price before unloading. Retail investors take over, the narrative collapses, and they lose everything.
The world of Meme coins is just this wild; hype is everything, but hype comes quickly and goes even faster.
#mene