Memecoin holders added to their club one lawmaker: Rep. Michael Collins, who represents Georgia’s 10th congressional district.
On Monday, Collins submitted his sixth financial disclosure for 2024, revealing three purchases all involving cryptocurrencies made in the last two days. One entailed acquiring between $1,001 and $15,000 of AERO, the native currency for decentralized exchange Aerodrome. The remaining two each with the same value range included ski mask dog (SKI), according to the periodic transaction report filed with the Clerk of the House of Representatives.
With a current market cap of $1.1 billion, AERO has increased 4.6% in the last 24 hours to trade hands at $1.60, while SKI has grown nearly 6% to trade at just under 13 cents, per CoinGecko. Jesse Pollak, the creator of the Base blockchain, wrote on X Tuesday evening, “Cool to see @RepMikeCollins being based onchain.”
SKI, a memecoin of a dog wearing a ski mask, on Coinbase-incubated L2 network Base, started trading in April 2024 and has since garnered a market cap of nearly $135 million.
The acquisition of ski mask dog marks the first time Collins gained exposure to memecoins, the best-performing sector in the crypto space, jumping about 333% in the last year, blockchain analytics firm Artemis shows.
Each of the Georgia representative’s 2024 financial disclosures was entirely composed of cryptocurrency transactions, in which 14 were purchases and 4 were sells. The majority of his transactions were valued between $1,001 and $15,000. Meanwhile, three transactions were valued between $15,001 and $50,000 as two were purchases of ETH with the outstanding remainder being AERO.
Other coins in Collins’ financial disclosures earlier in the year included Ethereum’s ETH, Velodrome’s VELO, and The Graph’s GRT.
Collins’ first disclosure regarding cryptocurrencies came on August 3, 2023 when ETH was trading at $1,835. The price of ETH is now at $3,615. Collins did not immediately respond to Unchained’s request for comments.
