Talk about a Friday night surprise. President-elect Donald Trump’s social media accounts shared what appears to be an official Solana meme coin called TRUMP, just three days before he is sworn in for his second term in the White House.
Degen traders immediately bought in, generating hundreds of millions of dollars in trading volume as on-chain sleuths and security experts looked for red flags. But with Trump’s X and Truth Social posts still online after more than an hour and some initial red flags dissipated upon closer inspection, it appears to be a legitimate coin flip Trump.
“My NEW official Trump meme is HERE! It’s time to celebrate everything we stand for: WINNING! Join my very special Trump community. GET YOUR $ASSET NOW,” Trump’s official X account posted.
The launch was immediately met with excitement, confusion and a lot of skepticism. Indeed, the scheme had all the familiar hallmarks of many celebrity scams launched over the last year, with a public figure’s social media account hacked to promote a pump-and-dump scam.
Truth Social’s post was published first, but once the X post followed on its official account, concerns began to subside. Additionally, the coin has mostly only risen so far, with no falls to date.
Chain sleuths pointed out possible red flags, including the apparent fact that the project was funded by millions of dollars from Binance and Gate, two exchanges that don’t serve U.S. customers. But other apparent concerns diminished as research continued, not to mention the fact that Trump’s social media posts remained online.
The room official website resembles those used to sell and promote his past NFT collections, and is credited to CIC Digital, the same official Trump licensee behind NFTs. Meme Coin’s website was “deployed almost identically on its previous NFT website,” pseudonymous blockchain engineer cygaar tweeted following initial suspicions.
“Either this is the biggest cyber heist of all time, or it’s legitimate,” he added.
Meme coin traders are buying the coin in droves, pushing it to a price of $7.31 as of this writing. DexScreener lists a market cap of $7.1 billion, which would make it one of the top 30 cryptocurrencies if accurate, although there is a caveat.
Out of 1 billion coins, the website says 80% are locked and will be gradually unlocked over a three-year period. As such, the circulating supply would only be 200 million tokens, which would put the market cap closer to $1.5 billion at the time of this writing. So far, the trading volume has reached around $680 million.
Trump ran on a pro-crypto platform, and beyond his previous NFT collections launched between 2022 and 2024, Trump also supported a decentralized finance platform called World Liberty Financial.
He is expected to publish a first decree concerning cryptocurrency which could be the first in a long series, as Decrypt reported This week, Trump is reportedly preparing guidelines that could reshape the US crypto landscape for builders and investors.
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