The collapse of Eric Adams’s much hyped NYC Token was supposed to be a contained embarrassment. Instead, the fallout from the former New York City mayor’s crypto play has widened into a tangle of missing money, furious investors, and fresh questions about who really stood to benefit. What began as a flashy meme coin launch tied to civic pride and social causes now looks, to many, like a case study in how political celebrity and speculative finance can collide in the worst possible way.
As more details emerge about the token’s launch, the rapid price spike, and the sudden extraction of liquidity, the controversy has only deepened. Blockchain sleuths, retail traders, and ethics watchdogs are now picking apart Adams’s role, the structure of the project, and the network of allies around him, turning a single failed coin into a broader referendum on his judgment and his lingering influence in New York politics.
The hype machine around NYC Token
Eric Adams had long styled himself as a “Bitcoin Mayor,” and earlier this year he tried to convert that brand into a new venture by unveiling NYC Token as a city themed cryptocurrency tied to social causes. At a press event in Times Square, the former New York City Mayor Eric Ada presented the NYC Token as a way for ordinary New Yorkers to invest in the city’s future while supporting charitable initiatives, echoing the framing later summarized in On Monday coverage. Promotional materials and interviews leaned heavily on Adams’s record as Former New York mayor Eric Adams and his promise that the NYC Token would channel a portion of proceeds into community projects, a pitch later echoed in Morningstar reporting.
The rollout was designed to look like a grassroots movement but was powered by a classic influencer style push, with Adams using his profile as New York City Mayor Eric Adams to validate the project and reassure skeptical retail buyers. In one account of the launch, he “hawk[ed] a Crypto Coin” to his followers and political base, only for roughly $1 million in proceeds to vanish from the project’s wallets shortly afterward, unnerving early backers who had taken him at his word, as detailed in Eric Adams Hawked. The Brief later described how Eric Adams unveiled NYC Token on Monday as a city themed asset aimed at funding social causes, underscoring how civic language was used to market what was, in practice, a speculative meme coin, a framing captured in The Brief.
From moonshot to meltdown in hours
Once trading opened, NYC Token behaved like a textbook meme coin rocket, with thin liquidity and intense hype driving a vertiginous price spike. Crypto analysts noted that NYC Token, which hit the market on Monday, surged to $580 before collapsing, a trajectory that left late buyers nursing immediate losses and fueled accusations that insiders had gamed the market. Less than an hour after the $NYC token’s trading launch, Adams was already facing allegations that he had participated in a “rug pull,” with critics pointing to publicly available blockchain data that showed large holders dumping into the spike, as described in Less…