Talk about a Friday night surprise. Three days before President-elect Donald Trump's social media accounts take the oath of office for a second term in the White House, Trump has shared an official Solana meme coin.
With chainsaws and security experts hunting for red flags, Dagen's traders immediately bought in, generating hundreds of millions of dollars worth of trade. But while Trump X and Truth's social posts continued for more than an hour and some early red flags were cleared up, it looks like this is a legitimate Trump meme coin toss.
“My new official Trump meme is here! It's time to celebrate everything we stand for: Winner! Join my exclusive Trump community. Find yours $ TRUMP Now,” Trump's official X account posted.
The launch was immediately met with excitement, confusion and a lot of skepticism. This is because the project has been a hallmark of several celebrity meme coin scams that started last year, where a public figure's social media account was hacked to promote the pump and dump scam.
A real social post was released first, but after X's post followed on his official account, concerns began to cool. Also, the coin has only been minted so far, with no scraps as of this writing.
On-chain hacks pointed out red flags, including that the project was seeded with millions of dollars in funding from Binance and Gate—two exchanges that don't serve US customers. But Trump's social posts have remained online over time, not to mention some other obvious threats have been mitigated by more sleuthing.
The coin's official website looks similar to the one used to sell and promote its past NFT collections, and CIC Digital is credited with having the same Trump license behind the NFTs. It was a meme coin websiteDistributed similarly to the old NFT website,” tweeted Saigar, an anonymous blockchain engineer, after initial skepticism.
“Either this is the greatest cyber heist of all time, or this is legit,” he added.
Memecoin traders are buying the coin in droves, pushing the price up to $7.31 as of this writing. DexScreener lists a market cap of $7.1 billion, which would make it a top 30 cryptocurrency if accurate – albeit with a caveat.
About 80% of the 1 billion coins will be locked up and gradually unlocked over three years, the website said. In this way, the distribution supply will be only 200 million tokens, which will bring the market value to 1.5 billion dollars as of this writing. So far, there has been an estimated $680 million in trade.
Trump ran on a pro-crypto platform, and in addition to his previous NFT collections launched between 2022 and 2024, Trump has endorsed a decentralized financial platform called Global Freedom Finance.
This week, Decrypt reported that Trump is expected to issue an executive order on cryptocurrency, the first of many, that could shape the U.S. crypto landscape for developers and investors.
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