Trump launched his own memecoin. What is going on?

President-elect Donald Trump is set to take office on Monday and his main priority yesterday — at the same time as a big crypto ball was taking place in Washington — was to launch a memecoin on Solana .

It was one of the most surprising moves in crypto history.

“This is beyond insane,” wrote The Kobeissi Letter on X, commenting on the swift rise of the price of Trump’s token, which became the fastest memecoin ever to hit a $4 billion market cap, before adding, “What is happening?”

While the move was unanticipated, it’s not to say it wasn’t forewarned. Trump has been cosying up to the crypto industry for the last year now, with many signs of friendliness. He’s engaged with key leaders of the industry, he’s spoken at conferences, promised multiple executive orders, kicked out SEC Chair Gary Gensler and even launched his own crypto project World Liberty Financial. But an actual tradeable token tied to him? That’s new.

Shortly after the posts were made on Truth Social, there was a lot of skepticism whether this token was real — especially given that even the SEC’s X account has been hacked before. Yet it wasn’t long before projects like Solana exchange Jupiter confirmed that it was indeed real.

Breaking down the token’s ‘wild distribution’

One big issue and potential area of concern is the supply of the memecoin. Only 20% of the token’s supply is currently on the market, half of which was allocated to be distributed to the public and the other half for providing liquidity on decentralized exchanges. Yet the remainder of the supply is set to be distributed to the creators of the memecoin and a company called CIC Digital, which is an affiliate of the Trump Organization. 

What this means is that the token’s circulating market cap will differ massively from its fully diluted valuation. The current market cap is $4.3 billion but its FDV is just shy of $22 billion. This suggests a lot of selling pressure over the next few years. Some of the lockups have a cliff of just three months, meaning the team will be able to start selling daily for the next three years from that point.

“That is a wild distribution for a meme coin,” investigative YouTuber CoffeeZilla said on X , noting that “80% of tokens vest to insiders DURING the presidency.” These tokens are also currently held in a single wallet.

Impact of the token launch

The launch of Trump’s memecoin had a number of knock-on effects.

For a start it directly impacted the prices of Trump’s NFT card collection, with prices rising fourfold in the last few hours. This has partly been to suggestions that the NFTs might get some sort of token allocation, as the official website says “See Card Allocation Here” with a link that goes to the distribution chart. No other details are provided and it’s unclear whether the NFTs will actually receive any tokens and what the conditions would be.

The memecoin’s launch also caused a huge surge in trading activity on Solana, with its daily volume rising to all-time highs. Yesterday saw $9.2 billion in trading volume, according to DefiLlama , while today has seen $9.34 billion so far. This caused strain on exchanges, such as Coinbase, which noted that some users may be experiencing delays on receiving and sending Solana around the time of the launch.

The launch did well for one trader in particular, who bought $1.1 million worth of TRUMP tokens within two minutes of the token going live. They sold some of these tokens for $3.65 million and continue to hold onto around $87 million of tokens — resulting in total proceeds above $90 million .

Looking ahead, Binance Futures is adding perpetuals for the Trump memecoin, with up to 25X leverage.

How crypto twitter reacted

Plenty of crypto natives weren’t awake when the token launched and were notably upset that they missed out on the fastest token appreciation in history. “Never sleeping again,” posted the official Solana account on X.

“Never seen anything like this, SOL ripping and everything on chain nuking as people panic sell to fomo into Trump’s memecoin. What is going on,” said author Jason Williams.

Some argued that a President launching a memecoin directly before his inauguration couldn’t be overstated. “Trump is going to juice the markets so much he’ll make Janet Yellen look like Volcker,” said Geiger Capital on X.

While there was a lot of euphoria, some were skeptical that this memecoin was the right play for Trump. “It’s hard to see this as anything but a pump and dump scheme. Schemes like this reinforce negative perceptions of crypto, making it hard for the space to gain trust credibility,” said Rotki founder Lefteris Karapetsas.

Crypto trader CL claimed the memecoin may help to onboard many Americans to crypto but that they might get "rugged to new depths," putting the industry on a bad path.

“Final thoughts on this Trump memecoin is that it makes me feel deeply uneasy but I think the market continues to rally,” posted McKenna, managing partner at Arete Capital. “A Trump Administration is simply an endless number of white swans for the asset class and this has nowhere near been exhausted. When good news from the Trump Administration no longer shows market strength there is your market top.”

Conor Grogan, head of product business operations at Coinbase, questioned why the Trump memecoin was seeded with deposits from crypto exchanges Gate.io and Binance, neither of which are available to US users. They funded the account that created the memecoin with $1,500 of SOL in the two weeks before the token was launched.

Not a security?

Trump launching a memecoin on Gensler’s last day in office seemed symbolic to the change in leadership and stance on crypto. While Gensler had been leading an SEC that was hostile to the crypto industry, it’s clear that the next administration will be anything but.

Some observers pointed out that on the Trump memecoin website, it clarifies the memecoin is “not intended to be, or to be the subject of, an investment opportunity, investment contract, or security of any type.” This suggests that Trump is taking an open-minded approach to securities laws regarding crypto, or at the least for memecoins. 

Yet this won’t be confirmed until the industry sees the actions of the SEC over the next few months and years — something that everyone will be watching for.