Inside President Trump's New Memecoin
By Will McKinnon January 21, 2025
Introduction
Friday night around 9pm EST, current President Donald Trump announced the launch of his official memecoin, setting off one of the craziest weekends I remember in my entire crypto career. With how many people are now reaching out asking what happened with Trump’s memecoin, we decided to put together a quick overview of exactly what went down.
The Scoop:
With the initial launch price under $500M FDV or $0.50, panic spread through the market like wildfire as everyone paying attention tried to figure out whether it was real or not. As confirmations rolled in from the teams at Jupiter and Moonshot, the coin rapidly rose to $12B in a matter of only 4 hours, representing a 24x from the first official listing on Moonshot.
TRUMP went on to reach an all-time-high valuation of $75B on Saturday, making it a top 20 coin in the world by market cap. This drove some of the top traders to earn literally hundreds of millions of dollars, all within 72 hours. Since launching in partnership with Moonshot, it has gained listings on major exchanges like Coinbase and Binance, and even got listed on Robinhood late Sunday night. Despite all these listings and attention on the world stage from virtually anyone even remotely interested in crypto, TRUMP experienced a -50% drawdown in a matter of minutes Sunday as Melania announced that now she too would be launching her own memecoin. Instantly the value proposition of this being the Trump family’s only coin (which admittedly is not much of a value prop to begin with) disappeared, and Melania’s coin caused Trump’s to lose $40B of market cap.
After recovering somewhat from the initial selloff, TRUMP is back to trading at $43. At this point we are in unprecedented times, the leader of the free world himself is promoting his own memecoin – for an asset that derives all of its value from attention, it’s hard to imagine something that would get more attention than this. Likely the biggest obstacle for the coin in the medium-to-long term is the fact that 80% of the supply remains locked in vesting contracts, to be dripped out over 3 years starting 3 months from Friday. This means that while the coin may currently have a $43B FDV, it really only has a $8.5B market cap. As more and more coins are unlocked that means more buyers need to step in to sustain the price, which as we’ve seen with the big alt coins, becomes a massive capital burden.
Source: TRUMP Website
Conclusion
Who knows where all of this goes, but it’s definitely something to pay attention to even if you’re not trading it. Now that TRUMP has been listed on Moonshot, Coinbase, Robinhood and more you can likely find it on whichever your favorite exchange is so no need to go hunting onchain to find the right one. If you’re interested in checking it out further, you can find the official TRUMP meme site here.
