Trump Memecoin Shows Limits of Crypto’s Democratization Pitch At 9 p.m. on Jan. 17, then President-elect Donald Trump announced to his more than 8 million followers on TruthSocial that he was releasing his own crypto memecoin. The token, called Trump, featured an image of him captured shortly after a failed assassination attempt last year: In it, he’s raising his right fist and looking defiant. Trump’s message on TruthSocial, coming just days before his second inauguration, was simple: “It’s time to celebrate everything we stand for: WINNING!” Within minutes, thousands of speculators began piling into the new token through a platform called Meteora. The frenzied buying drove the price to over $70, sending the market value of circulating tokens close to $15 billion. But before most investors had even started trading in earnest, 21 crypto “whales” — defined here as traders who purchased at least 500,000 tokens per associated crypto wallet in the first hour of the token’s launch — bought and sold millions of tokens as the price skyrocketed. In the first few minutes of trading, those wallets accounted for the bulk of the transactions. In addition, they generated some $214.3 million in gains during the token’s first 48 hours in existence, a Bloomberg News analysis of millions of transactions shows. And among the whales, the gains were unevenly distributed: a single cluster of related wallets generated a whopping $170 million. Memecoins are a highly speculative corner of crypto, one in which the asset offered typically doesn’t have much intrinsic value beyond whatever profits investors anticipate from flipping it. For all of crypto’s public promises to “democratize” finance, memecoins are often a losing proposition for smaller buyers, while proving wildly lucrative for their issuers as well as a few well-resourced traders. At the same time, two Trump-linked entities — CIC Digital and Fight Fight Fight LLC — own 80% of the supply, a holding that will be unlocked over three years according to the official website. That has the potential to put pressure on the memecoin’s price in the future should those entities start selling. “It’s completely abnormal to have a memecoin where 80% of supply goes to founders,” said Shuyao Kong, co-founder of blockchain project MegaETH. “In fact, memecoins take pride in fair launch, meaning no insiders were able to acquire tokens before launch.” By far the biggest winner of all – let’s call it Cluster A – showed an uncanny ability to time their trades, realizing a total profit of $170 million in the memecoin’s first two days, the Bloomberg News analysis shows. Activities performed by Cluster A tell a story of informed and well-timed transactions. First, a single wallet – Wallet A – received transfers totalling about $1.1 million in the form of the USDC stablecoin about two hours before Trump’s post announcing the token. Then, roughly ninety seconds after the post on TruthSocial, Wallet A purchased about 6 million Trump tokens at 18 cents apiece. That single purchase accounted for about 6% of the total available supply of 100 million tokens. Then, a few minutes later, Wallet A sent all of its Trump tokens to a new wallet – Wallet B. That wallet then sent tokens to several other wallets at a rate of hundreds of thousands of tokens per minute. That group of wallets made periodic sales worth millions of dollars over the next two days, including when prices peaked at $78 on Jan. 19. Later that day, as prices came off the intra-day lows to hover around $75, just off the peak, these assorted wallets that comprised Cluster A dumped about 1.7 million tokens over a three hour period. Wallet B sold a total of 650,000 Trump tokens in just three minutes. “Many of the on-chain ‘whales’ are sophisticated traders and prop funds that have automated trading set-ups that allow them to buy new token launches early if the token fits a certain criterion, often related to momentum and liquidity, and then sell when they reach a certain level of return or hit another milestone,” said Rob Hadick, general partner at crypto venture capital fund Dragonfly. By contrast, whether buyers who jumped in later won or lost money on their trades was essentially a coin toss, the analysis shows. In the first two days of trading, one Trump buyer lost as much as $5 million, according to the Bloomberg News analysis; whereas another wallet showed more than $85 million in gains. One thing both winners and losers had in common was their frequency of trading: the wallets that lost the most money and the ones that generated the highest returns all made thousands of transactions in a short amount of time. The two Trump-linked entities — CIC Digital and Fight Fight Fight LLC — have generated at least $11.5 million in fees from trading in the token as of Jan. 31, according to risk modeling firm Gauntlet. CIC Digital has previously generated millions of dollars from licensing Trump’s image on digital collectibles. Representatives for the White House and CIC Digital did not immediately return a request for comment. Interest in the Trump token has waned since that heady first weekend between the launch and the presidential inauguration: as at Jan. 31, the token had fallen more than 60% from its high. But nearly 700,000 wallets still hold the token, and it ranks among the top 40 cryptocurrencies by market value, according to data aggregator CoinGecko — beating out many coins that have been around for years. These patterns of activity and interest make the Trump token a memecoin outlier, even beyond the fact that it was launched by a two-time president who has 100 million followers on X. Edited by: stacy-marie ishmaelPhilip LagerkranserChloe WhiteakerYue Qiu Crypto With assistance from: Jeff Kao Crypto Methodology Data Bloomberg News used tools provided by blockchain infrastructure and developer platform Helius to collect a total of 5.1 million Trump token transactions on the Solana blockchain, executed between 9 p.m. on Jan. 17 and 9 p.m. Eastern time on Jan. 19. Each entry contained a description of the transaction, information about the nature of the transaction (e.g. "SWAP", "TRANSFER", etc.), its unique signature, the original wallet, the receiving wallet, the fees paid, and the decentralized trading platforms where the transaction took place. Bloomberg News collected real-time Trump token price data from Chaos Labs. Data processing For each transaction marked as "SWAP" or "TRANSFER", Bloomberg inferred whether it was a "BUY", "SELL" or "TRANSFER". If the transaction was marked as a "SWAP" and the wallet swapped TRUMP for Solana (SOL) or USDC, it would be coded as a SELL. If the transaction was marked as a "SWAP" and the wallet swapped SOL or USDC for TRUMP, then it would be marked as a BUY. If the transaction was marked as a "TRANSFER" but the transferred currency matched stablecoin USDC or SOL and the receiving wallet matched one owned by a decentralized trading platform (Meteora or Jupiter), it would be marked as a SELL. Conversely, if the transaction was marked as a "TRANSFER" but the original wallet matched an exchange wallet, and the receiving wallet did not match an exchange wallet, then it would be marked as a BUY. In all other cases, transactions would keep their original code. To compute the dollar value of each transaction, Bloomberg matched the timestamp of each transaction with temporal price data, and multiplied the TRUMP amount by the TRUMP dollar value at time of transaction. Bloomberg's analysis excludes any executions on centralized exchanges such as Binance. Identifying whale wallets For the purposes of this story, Bloomberg defined a "whale" as any wallet that held at least 500,000 TRUMP tokens (0.5% of the 100M public supply) within the first hour of the launch (9 p.m. - 10:00PM Eastern time on Jan. 17). Bloomberg identified whales by filtering the data for any wallet that made a purchase of at least 500,000 TRUMP, or any wallet of which net BUYS amounted to 500,000 TRUMP at any minute interval during the first hour of launch. Calculating profits Bloomberg tallied up each whale BUY and SELL transaction in dollar value at time of purchase. Bloomberg substracted the total $USD value of BUY transactions from the total $USD value of SELL transactions to calculate raw profit. For the wallets that still held some TRUMP, Bloomberg calculated each wallet's unrealized profit using the TRUMP value at 9pm Eastern on Jan. 19 ($46.50). Bloomberg added raw profit and unrealized profit to calculate total profit. Bloomberg manually tracked each wallet that Wallet A transferred Trump token to and that did not buy any additional amount and defined them as Cluster A. Bloomberg tallied up each SELL transaction from those wallets to compute Cluster A's net profits.
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Trump Memecoin Shows Limits of Crypto’s Democratization Pitch

At 9 p.m. on Jan. 17, then President-elect Donald Trump announced to his more than 8 million followers on TruthSocial that he was releasing his own crypto memecoin. The token, called Trump, featured an image of him captured shortly after a failed assassination attempt last year: In it, he’s raising his right fist and looking defiant.

Trump’s message on TruthSocial, coming just days before his second inauguration, was simple: “It’s time to celebrate everything we stand for: WINNING!”

Within minutes, thousands of speculators began piling into the new token through a platform called Meteora. The frenzied buying drove the price to over $70, sending the market value of circulating tokens close to $15 billion.

But before most investors had even started trading in earnest, 21 crypto “whales” — defined here as traders who purchased at least 500,000 tokens per associated crypto wallet in the first hour of the token’s launch — bought and sold millions of tokens as the price skyrocketed.

In the first few minutes of trading, those wallets accounted for the bulk of the transactions. In addition, they generated some $214.3 million in gains during the token’s first 48 hours in existence, a Bloomberg News analysis of millions of transactions shows. And among the whales, the gains were unevenly distributed: a single cluster of related wallets generated a whopping $170 million.

Memecoins are a highly speculative corner of crypto, one in which the asset offered typically doesn’t have much intrinsic value beyond whatever profits investors anticipate from flipping it. For all of crypto’s public promises to “democratize” finance, memecoins are often a losing proposition for smaller buyers, while proving wildly lucrative for their issuers as well as a few well-resourced traders.

At the same time, two Trump-linked entities — CIC Digital and Fight Fight Fight LLC — own 80% of the supply, a holding that will be unlocked over three years according to the official website. That has the potential to put pressure on the memecoin’s price in the future should those entities start selling.

“It’s completely abnormal to have a memecoin where 80% of supply goes to founders,” said Shuyao Kong, co-founder of blockchain project MegaETH. “In fact, memecoins take pride in fair launch, meaning no insiders were able to acquire tokens before launch.”

By far the biggest winner of all – let’s call it Cluster A – showed an uncanny ability to time their trades, realizing a total profit of $170 million in the memecoin’s first two days, the Bloomberg News analysis shows.

Activities performed by Cluster A tell a story of informed and well-timed transactions.

First, a single wallet – Wallet A – received transfers totalling about $1.1 million in the form of the USDC stablecoin about two hours before Trump’s post announcing the token. Then, roughly ninety seconds after the post on TruthSocial, Wallet A purchased about 6 million Trump tokens at 18 cents apiece.

That single purchase accounted for about 6% of the total available supply of 100 million tokens.

Then, a few minutes later, Wallet A sent all of its Trump tokens to a new wallet – Wallet B. That wallet then sent tokens to several other wallets at a rate of hundreds of thousands of tokens per minute. That group of wallets made periodic sales worth millions of dollars over the next two days, including when prices peaked at $78 on Jan. 19.

Later that day, as prices came off the intra-day lows to hover around $75, just off the peak, these assorted wallets that comprised Cluster A dumped about 1.7 million tokens over a three hour period. Wallet B sold a total of 650,000 Trump tokens in just three minutes.

“Many of the on-chain ‘whales’ are sophisticated traders and prop funds that have automated trading set-ups that allow them to buy new token launches early if the token fits a certain criterion, often related to momentum and liquidity, and then sell when they reach a certain level of return or hit another milestone,” said Rob Hadick, general partner at crypto venture capital fund Dragonfly.

By contrast, whether buyers who jumped in later won or lost money on their trades was essentially a coin toss, the analysis shows.

In the first two days of trading, one Trump buyer lost as much as $5 million, according to the Bloomberg News analysis; whereas another wallet showed more than $85 million in gains.

One thing both winners and losers had in common was their frequency of trading: the wallets that lost the most money and the ones that generated the highest returns all made thousands of transactions in a short amount of time.

The two Trump-linked entities — CIC Digital and Fight Fight Fight LLC — have generated at least $11.5 million in fees from trading in the token as of Jan. 31, according to risk modeling firm Gauntlet. CIC Digital has previously generated millions of dollars from licensing Trump’s image on digital collectibles.

Representatives for the White House and CIC Digital did not immediately return a request for comment.

Interest in the Trump token has waned since that heady first weekend between the launch and the presidential inauguration: as at Jan. 31, the token had fallen more than 60% from its high.

But nearly 700,000 wallets still hold the token, and it ranks among the top 40 cryptocurrencies by market value, according to data aggregator CoinGecko — beating out many coins that have been around for years.

These patterns of activity and interest make the Trump token a memecoin outlier, even beyond the fact that it was launched by a two-time president who has 100 million followers on X.

Edited by: stacy-marie ishmaelPhilip LagerkranserChloe WhiteakerYue Qiu Crypto With assistance from: Jeff Kao Crypto
Methodology

Data
Bloomberg News used tools provided by blockchain infrastructure and developer platform Helius to collect a total of 5.1 million Trump token transactions on the Solana blockchain, executed between 9 p.m. on Jan. 17 and 9 p.m. Eastern time on Jan. 19. Each entry contained a description of the transaction, information about the nature of the transaction (e.g. "SWAP", "TRANSFER", etc.), its unique signature, the original wallet, the receiving wallet, the fees paid, and the decentralized trading platforms where the transaction took place. Bloomberg News collected real-time Trump token price data from Chaos Labs.

Data processing
For each transaction marked as "SWAP" or "TRANSFER", Bloomberg inferred whether it was a "BUY", "SELL" or "TRANSFER". If the transaction was marked as a "SWAP" and the wallet swapped TRUMP for Solana (SOL) or USDC, it would be coded as a SELL. If the transaction was marked as a "SWAP" and the wallet swapped SOL or USDC for TRUMP, then it would be marked as a BUY. If the transaction was marked as a "TRANSFER" but the transferred currency matched stablecoin USDC or SOL and the receiving wallet matched one owned by a decentralized trading platform (Meteora or Jupiter), it would be marked as a SELL. Conversely, if the transaction was marked as a "TRANSFER" but the original wallet matched an exchange wallet, and the receiving wallet did not match an exchange wallet, then it would be marked as a BUY. In all other cases, transactions would keep their original code. To compute the dollar value of each transaction, Bloomberg matched the timestamp of each transaction with temporal price data, and multiplied the TRUMP amount by the TRUMP dollar value at time of transaction. Bloomberg's analysis excludes any executions on centralized exchanges such as Binance.

Identifying whale wallets
For the purposes of this story, Bloomberg defined a "whale" as any wallet that held at least 500,000 TRUMP tokens (0.5% of the 100M public supply) within the first hour of the launch (9 p.m. - 10:00PM Eastern time on Jan. 17). Bloomberg identified whales by filtering the data for any wallet that made a purchase of at least 500,000 TRUMP, or any wallet of which net BUYS amounted to 500,000 TRUMP at any minute interval during the first hour of launch.

Calculating profits
Bloomberg tallied up each whale BUY and SELL transaction in dollar value at time of purchase. Bloomberg substracted the total $USD value of BUY transactions from the total $USD value of SELL transactions to calculate raw profit. For the wallets that still held some TRUMP, Bloomberg calculated each wallet's unrealized profit using the TRUMP value at 9pm Eastern on Jan. 19 ($46.50). Bloomberg added raw profit and unrealized profit to calculate total profit. Bloomberg manually tracked each wallet that Wallet A transferred Trump token to and that did not buy any additional amount and defined them as Cluster A. Bloomberg tallied up each SELL transaction from those wallets to compute Cluster A's net profits.