The cryptocurrency industry can claim another magnanimous accomplishment to its name: transforming a wholesome New York City dog contest into little more than an online pump and dump scheme.
The Honorary NYC Dog Mayor Election of 2024 was designed to be a fun, local competition between pooches. Dog-owners enter their pets into the contest, and then people online are allowed to vote on which is the most qualified to be dog mayor of New York (as far as I can tell, the qualifications begin and end with cuteness). Basically, its fantasy football—but with dogs.
Unfortunately, the New York Times reported Wednesday that crypto bros had somehow caught wind of the competition and sunk their stupid, money-addled fangs into it. Indeed, it appears that one of the dogs, a Pomeranian named Bertram (or “Bertie,” as he’s better known), had a memecoin named after him. The working theory is that crypto holders then began promoting Bertram in the hopes that the price of the coin would rise, should he win.
One of the owners, an influencer named Olivia Caputo, said that she began to notice that the contest was being irregularly skewed after seeing the vote tallies increase exponentially in a short period of time:
Ms. Caputo said she first noticed something was awry in the quarterfinal matchup between Bertram and Ziggy the Yorkie mix.
Bertram’s vote total increased sharply, to 4,000-plus votes, after receiving about 1,000 in the first round. That uptick coincided with people starting to push the dog hard on social media platforms and even posting offers of money for others to vote for him, Ms. Caputo said.
She discovered a public chat on Telegram about the contest with thousands of messages a day, she said: “They were using very hateful and violent language to Enzo. They said they would use the platform to ‘pump the price.’”
Caputo ultimately took her dog—a Shih Tzu named Enzo—out of the competition after it became apparent that the votes were being skewed. “I don’t want my name attached to any pump-and-dump scheme,” she told the paper. “It sucked out all the fun and cheapened the whole thing.”
In the end, Bertram got the largest share of votes, but the competition operators were concerned that the result had been manipulated by the web3 goons. “I noticed spikes at certain times of the vote for Bertram,” said Stephen Calabria, the founder of the contest. “There were certain things that just didn’t seem right. Like blocs of 2,000 votes at once. It went from neck-and-neck to Bertram winning by 96 percent or something.”
In the end, Bertram graciously stepped down from the contest, ceding victory to his opponent, a cattle dog named Simon.
“Frankly, I had always envisioned this as a good faith and good humored way to get shelter dogs adopted and to use this as a platform for good,” Calabria told the Times. “If I never hear the word crypto again, it will be a blessing.”
Unfortunately for Calabria, his wish is unlikely to come true. As we’ve previously noted, crypto backers just enjoyed a windfall of electoral victories. As a result, the prevalence of crypto in this country is likely to grow in the coming years, as is the industry’s grip over U.S. financial policy. Indeed, while the crypto industry suffered increased regulatory scrutiny during the Biden years, The Washington Post has reported that president elect Donald Trump is currently eyeing major crypto proponents for key financial regulator jobs. Many of the agencies tasked with overseeing the industry—most notably, the Securities and Exchange Commission—could soon be staffed by bureaucrats who are in its back pocket.
Meanwhile, Trump has promised to fire Gary Gensler, the current head of the SEC. Gensler came under fire by the crypto community for doing something that, as a federal regulator, he was not expected to do: his job. During his tenure, he looked into misbehaving crypto firms and sought to impose sane legal requirements on an otherwise unrestrained financial phenomenon that has stolen billions of dollars from the American public. Crypto trolls have blamed Gensler for being a draconian bureaucrat, but they really have only themselves to blame. Democrats were warming to the crypto industry until the FTX fiasco, which blew a hole in the industry’s credibility and forced regulators to take a harder line against web3’s obvious excesses and criminality. Today, Gensler released a statement suggesting he would soon be leaving the SEC.
This is all a long way of saying that, contrary to Calabria’s wishes, we are all about to hear the word “crypto”—a lot. I wouldn’t be surprised if this is only the first of many dog mayor competitions that are hijacked by money-crazed web3 shitbags. Indeed, other recent headlines seem to portend a future dominated by untold “decentralized” stupidity: Elon Musk has named a new “government agency” after his favorite shitcoin; Caitlyn Jenner was just sued for her alleged role in a memecoin scam; Bitcoin’s value has spiked to a new all-time high; Pennsylvania wants to create its own “strategic reserve” of crypto. The normies have lost. Let the good times roll.