NYC Token: The Bitcoin Mayor's $600 Million Speed Run

On Monday 12 January 2026, Eric Adams stood in Times Square in the cold and launched a cryptocurrency. Twelve days earlier he had still been Mayor of New York City. He called the coin NYC Token and said it would fund the fight against antisemitism and "anti-Americanism", plus crypto education and scholarships for young New Yorkers. He did not say how a tradeable token would do any of that.

Within minutes of trading opening, the token was valued at about $580 million, according to CoinDesk, and close to $600 million on some trackers. The price touched about $0.47. Within roughly half an hour it had lost about 80% of that. By Thursday it sat near $0.13. In between, a wallet linked to the people who created the token took about $2.5 million in digital dollars out of the market where the coin traded, then put about $1.5 million back after the price had already collapsed.

The Bitcoin Mayor's second act

Adams had built part of his political identity on crypto. Elected in 2021, he promised to make New York the "crypto capital of the world" and had his first mayoral paycheck converted into Bitcoin and Ether through Coinbase, the largest American crypto broker. His single term was then dominated by something else: a federal indictment in September 2024 accusing him of taking illegal campaign contributions and travel perks linked to Turkish officials. The Justice Department under President Donald Trump asked for the case to be dropped, and a judge dismissed it in April 2025. Adams abandoned his re-election campaign and left City Hall at the end of December 2025.

NYC Token was his first project as a private citizen. It was a memecoin: a token with no business, earnings or assets behind it, whose price depends only on attention, a little like a penny stock with no company attached. It ran on Solana, a blockchain (a shared public ledger that records every transaction) popular for exactly this kind of launch because creating a new token there costs almost nothing.

The Associated Press reported that two people closely involved in the launch were Frank Carone, Adams's former chief adviser, and Yosef Sefi Zvieli, a real estate investor linked to several Israeli hotels who reached out to social media influencers before the debut. Neither appeared to have crypto experience. Brock Pierce, a crypto investor who called himself Adams's "crypto adviser", said he learned of the project only after launch. "Had I been consulted, I would've put together a team of more qualified people," he told the AP.

How the money left the room

A memecoin like this does not trade on a stock exchange or a broker such as Coinbase at first. It trades on a decentralised exchange, which has no company in the middle. Instead of a market maker standing ready to buy and sell, there is a liquidity pool: a pot holding the new token on one side and real money on the other. Here the real money was USDC, a stablecoin, meaning a digital dollar that its issuer, Circle, promises to redeem one for one. Buyers put dollars into the pot and take tokens out; sellers do the reverse. The price moves automatically with the balance between the two sides.

The pot works like the cash float in a shop till. As long as the dollars are there, anyone holding tokens can sell. Take the dollars out, and every holder is suddenly trying to cash out through a till with almost nothing in it. The price falls hard, and fast.

Bubblemaps, a blockchain analytics firm that maps how wallets are connected, said a wallet linked to the token's deployer (the address that created it) removed roughly $2.5 million in USDC from the pool at the peak. CoinDesk's own review put the withdrawal nearer $3 million. Once the price had fallen more than 60%, about $1.5 million came back. Somewhere around $900,000 to $1 million was not returned.

"This is such an obvious rug," wrote Nicolas Vaiman, Bubblemaps' chief executive. A rug pull is the crypto version of a promoter selling a stock out from under the people he talked into it: insiders take the money from the market and leave buyers holding something nobody will pay for. In an email to reporters, Vaiman said the team "pulled $2.5M at once, added back only $1.5M, and stayed silent until the backlash."

Who bought, and who lost

Vaiman counted just over 4,000 wallets that bought the token. About 80% of them bought during a 20-minute window after the coin became available but before Adams had announced it. That is the pattern of automated trading programs and insiders that watch for new tokens, buying before the public knows a coin exists. The people who heard the Times Square speech and rushed in were buying from them. In crypto slang, they were exit liquidity: the latecomers whose money lets early holders cash out.

By the Wednesday, the AP reported, most buyers had lost money. Fifteen traders were down at least $100,000 each. Ten were up at least $100,000. One wallet that bought before the token's address was public was reported to have lost about $500,000.

The headline valuation also needs care. A token's market value, like a company's market capitalisation, is the latest price multiplied by every unit in existence. When only a sliver of the supply actually trades and a few wallets hold almost all of it, that number says little about what anyone could sell for. A $580 million coin with a few million dollars in its pool was never worth $580 million to anyone trying to get out.

The denials

The token's account on X said its partners "had to rebalance the liquidity" because of "overwhelming support and demand for the token at launch," and promised the team was in it for the long haul. Adams, through his former campaign spokesman Todd Shapiro, said: "Eric Adams did not move investor funds. Eric Adams did not profit from the launch of the NYC Token." He called reports to the contrary "false and unsupported by evidence" and said the withdrawals were adjustments by the token's designated market maker. The AP reported that FalconX, a crypto trading firm, had been named as a market maker; FalconX declined to comment. Adams declined to name his partners.

Not everyone called it a scam. Benjamin Cowen, who runs the Into the Cryptoverse channel, said it "could be a legitimate project with just a really bad rollout." Some traders argued the money pulled was the project's own capital, not investors' deposits. That is true in a narrow sense, and it changes nothing for the buyer who needed that money in the pool to sell.

The project's website said a "portion of the proceeds" would be split three ways between campaigns against antisemitism and anti-Americanism, crypto education for city youth and a scholarship fund. It named no organisations and gave no percentage.

Then there was the name. Edward Cullen, chief executive of a startup called Crescite, said he had pitched a city token to the Adams administration, owned the domain nyctoken.com and had moved to trademark the term. "We're 100% confident that he took this concept from us," he told Decrypt, and said he was drafting a cease-and-desist letter.

NYC Token arrived a year after President Trump's own $TRUMP memecoin (January 2025) and about eleven months after Argentina's President Javier Milei promoted $LIBRA in February 2025, which collapsed within hours and left traders with an estimated $251 million in losses. Political coins had become a category of their own, with the same shape every time: a famous name, a vague cause, insiders ahead of the crowd.