Officially, it’s a joke token launched to celebrate the fight for freedom. Unofficially, it’s a finely tuned financial operation, with $100M pocketed, an 80% crash, and thousands of small holders wiped out.
Launched on 18 January 2025, three days before the inauguration, the $TRUMP token drew more than half a million buyers and briefly climbed into the top 15 cryptocurrencies by market capitalisation.
Dawn is barely breaking over the United States on 17 January when the first crypto forums catch fire. A new star is born in the Solana constellation: $TRUMP. In the parallel universe of decentralised finance, where value is sometimes created ex nihilo, a new token has just appeared, bearing the name of the 45th, and now 47th, US president.
One user asks what the utility is. Another replies, tersely, that it’s Trump, and that’s that. In a world where narrative often trumps functionality, that explanation seems perfectly sufficient. No revolutionary technology, no problem to solve, no service to offer, just a name, a brand, a political identity turned into a digital asset.
48 hours later, as the token is already drawing attention well beyond insider circles, a message appears on X and Truth Social. The former president himself, from his official account, posts:
My NEW Official Trump Meme is HERE! It's time to celebrate everything we stand for: WINNING!
Endorsed.
On the morning of 20 January, traders rub their eyes in front of their screens: $TRUMP has shot up to $74, taking its market cap to $14.5bn. That is the equivalent of a French industrial champion, a heavyweight of the CAC 40 (France’s blue-chip index), created in a matter of days.
Behind the scenes, blockchain analysts spot a crucial detail that most enthusiastic buyers will miss: 80% of the total supply remains strategically locked up and allocated to CIC Digital LLC, a subsidiary of the Trump Organization. These tokens are locked for periods of 3 to 12 months, followed by a gradual daily release over the following 24 months. The remaining 20% is spread across three carefully anonymised digital wallets.
But one analysis notably reveals that the $TRUMP creator wallet5 holds more than $157M in tokens6, across 888 different tokens, all linked to Trump.
To understand what is really going on with $TRUMP, you have to tune out the media noise and dive into the underlying economics. Because while the headlines dwell on the spectacular valuation, the real architects of the operation designed something far cleverer: an unstoppable liquidity pump.
Picture a machine where every coin you insert pays not the owner of the game, but mainly the first players. In barely two weeks, this machine called $TRUMP spat out $100M in transaction fees7, very real money.
The three initial wallets deployed a strategy inspired by Wall Street’s most sophisticated financial structures, adapted to the crypto environment. At its heart: Meteora, a decentralised finance platform that applies variable fees to every trade.
In traditional economics, transaction fees are friction, a “deadweight cost” that makes markets less efficient. In the $TRUMP architecture, those fees become the very engine of profit. Every buy, every sell, every move of panic or euphoria generates fees that trickle down, to borrow a fashionable phrase, to the early holders via the liquidity pools.
The more small investors churn, the higher the volatility, the more trades pile up... and the more the insiders cash in, whether the price goes up or down. A structure that turns even the final crash into a profit opportunity for its designers. The $MELANIA token, launched (or at least endorsed) by the First Lady a few days after $TRUMP, met a similar fate, collapsing 90% to $1.50 after peaking at $13.73 per token.
Blockchain analyses would later reveal another troubling bit of timing: shortly after the presidential announcement, wallets linked (distantly, but perhaps not that distantly) to the Trump team began methodically moving their tokens to various exchanges.
The process looks like precision choreography. First transfer: 2.3M tokens from the main wallet to Binance. Second move: 1.7M to KuCoin. Act three: the remaining holdings split across a constellation of decentralised platforms, making them harder to trace.
The sequence is irresistibly reminiscent of the famous Wall Street penny-stock pump and dump immortalised in The Wolf of Wall Street, except that here, the influencer isn’t a Long Island broker.
By early February, the crypto forums had gone quiet. The jokey memes had given way to loss calculations. $TRUMP sank below $20 on 2 February. The token would keep losing value in the following weeks, sliding to $10 by mid-March 2025, a fall of more than 85% from its ATH8.
Data compiled by Reuters, working with several blockchain analytics firms such as Chainalysis, puts at nearly 200,000 the number of crypto wallets, mostly HODLers, that lost money in the affair. The analysis also shows that at least 50 of the largest investors each made profits of more than $10M.
A telling detail: the $TRUMP creator wallet was active well before the official announcement. The mint dates from 17 January at 14:01 UTC, while Trump’s announcement only came on 18 January at 09:44 UTC. All night long, this wallet frantically bought a huge number of Trump-themed memecoins... At least 250 different tokens were bought before the official announcement, with the wallet buying non-stop. Then, strangely, when Trump’s announcement arrives, the account suddenly stops buying. But its holdings have just exploded in value.
According to several investigations, including one by 10x Research, the initial wallets methodically unloaded their positions in the hours before the token was listed on the main centralised exchanges9. Their report states explicitly that most early investors cashed out just before the big exchanges listed the coin, when it was trading above $60 and briefly reached $70. That timing is no accident: it is precisely the moment when the general public, less technical, less savvy but more numerous, could finally get easy access to the much-hyped token. As so often, retail served as exit liquidity…
The losses from the fall in the $TRUMP price echo earlier downturns, notably the boom and bust of NFTs in 2021.
But three factors make the $TRUMP case particularly worrying:
Economist Robert Shiller, a specialist in speculative bubbles, would probably have found in $TRUMP a perfect illustration of his theory of narrative feedback loops, where an asset’s value depends less on its fundamentals than on the story told about it. Except that here, the storytellers and the beneficiaries are the same people.