- Governor Gavin Newsom signed AB 2409 on September 27, 2026, barring California public officials from issuing meme coins
- The law also prohibits companies from listing any meme coin that uses a public official’s name or likeness on platforms operating in California
- The bill, authored by Assemblymember Avelino Valencia (D-Anaheim), was signed alongside 10 other anti-corruption and consumer-protection measures
California Governor Gavin Newsom signed AB 2409 on September 27, 2026, according to a release published on the Governor’s official website, barring public officials in the state from issuing their own meme coins. The law also prohibits cryptocurrency exchanges and companies from listing any meme coin that uses a public official’s name or likeness while operating in California.
The bill was authored by Assemblymember Avelino Valencia, a Democrat representing Anaheim, and was signed as part of a package of 10 other anti-corruption and consumer-protection bills Newsom approved the same day, positioning the meme coin measure within a broader legislative push targeting conflicts of interest involving public officials.
“No official should profit off their office, and we’re putting stronger protections in place to ensure it doesn’t happen in our state,” Newsom said in the release announcing the signing, tying the new restriction directly to concerns about elected officials using their public positions for personal financial gain through speculative digital assets.
The Governor’s release cited figures showing that nearly 1 million people lost a combined total of more than $3 billion investing in a meme coin tied to a sitting public figure that launched in 2025, while that figure personally profited an estimated $636 million from the token, using the episode as the central example motivating the legislation.
AB 2409 makes California one of the more explicit state-level efforts to regulate the intersection of meme coins and public office, addressing a category of token that has largely operated outside existing securities and commodities regulatory frameworks at the federal level, by instead restricting the conduct of officials and the listing practices of platforms operating within the state’s jurisdiction.
State-level lawmakers across the country have increasingly turned to targeted legislation like AB 2409 to address specific conduct involving digital assets, rather than waiting on broader federal crypto market structure legislation, and California’s approach of restricting both the officials themselves and the platforms that would list a token bearing their likeness closes off two separate avenues the same conduct might otherwise use.
Signing the meme coin restriction alongside a wider package of anti-corruption bills also signals that California lawmakers view the issue less as a crypto-specific regulatory question and more as a conflict-of-interest question, one that happens to involve digital assets as the vehicle rather than the traditional financial instruments such conduct rules have more commonly addressed in the past.
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