$TRUMP and $MELANIA Meme Coins: Performance & Insider Profits

$TRUMP

$TRUMP was launched on January 17th at $13.05 and peaked at $75.35 the day before Mr. Trump’s inauguration on January 20th and has been in decline ever since, currently trading at $12.83, a decline of 10.3% from last week, and is now DOWN 83% since its peak and now ranks 41st among meme coins.

Lockup Period Extended

Only 20% of the supply of $TRUMP is available to trade with the remaining 80%, reportedly controlled by the Trump Organization and affiliated entities (i.e. insiders), locked under a three-year schedule, with tokens getting released in increments. (Lockups are meant to prevent a rug pull, the industry term for a scheme that allows insiders to quickly get rich while other investors lose from a slumping price. Vesting schedules are designed to reassure retail investors that early backers won’t dump their coins and immediately flood the market.) The first unlocking was scheduled for this month but the Trump token’s official X account  has announced that that unlocking and the next three months of daily vesting is being delayed by an additional 90 days. As such, Trump will have to wait another three months before he can start selling his meme coin.

What Are Meme Coins?

Meme coins, often referred to as meme tokens, are a subset of digital assets that use blockchain technology and derive their value largely from internet culture, memes and social media hype rather than from an underlying utility or asset. They have grown in popularity in recent years as speculative assets, with some coins including dogecoin and fartcoin amassing total market values in excess of $1 billion.

Insiders Making A Fortune

The originators of meme coins can make fees when their coins are bought and sold and the creators of $TRUMP have done just that making a fortune despite the trading restrictions. According to Chainalysis, the main wallet behind $TRUMP earned more than $350 million in USDC, a dollar-pegged stablecoin, by acting as a market maker, collecting a fee on each trade.

$MELANIA

$MELANIA, was launched on January 19th at $3.05, peaked a day later at $13.69 and is currently trading at $0.33 which represents a decline of 13.2% since last week and now DOWN 97.5% since its peak ranking #247th among meme coins.

Some Background

A small group of crypto traders made nearly $100 million by buying Melania Trump’s meme coin minutes before it went public, research by the Financial Times has shown.

Insiders Made A Fortune

In the two and a half minutes between the $MELANIA meme coin going live and Melania officially unveiling it to the public on Jan. 19, two dozen digital wallets purchased tokens worth $2.6 million. Following Melania’s announcement the price of the coins surged rapidly by over 5,000% and most of the wallets that had purchased the cryptocurrency immediately sold off their holdings, with around 81% of traders selling the coin within 12 hours for massive profit.

According to analysis by the Times, “the entities which launched the coin—which are separate to the wallets that traded in it prior to the official announcement—have so far withdrawn profits of $64.7mn from fees and primary sales.”