A small group of crypto traders made nearly $100 million by buying Melania Trump’s memecoin minutes before it went public, research by the FT has shown.
The first lady’s $MELANIA coin was unveiled on Jan. 19, the day before her husband was sworn in as president. It followed a similar move by Trump himself, who launched his own $TRUMP coin several days prior.
But analysis shows that in the two and a half minutes between the currency going live and Melania officially unveiling it to the public on Truth Social, two dozen digital wallets purchased tokens worth $2.6 million.
Following Melania’s announcement the price of the coins surged rapidly by over 5000 percent and most of the wallets that had purchased the cryptocurrency immediately sold off their holdings, with around 81 percent of traders selling the coin within 12 hours for massive profit.
One of the wallets, the FT reports, purchased $681,000 of $MELANIA 64 seconds before the announcement was made public. Within 24 hours, the same account sold the majority of their stock for $39 million when the surge was at its highest, before dumping the rest and making an additional $4.4 million over the next three days.
The method is a stark contrast to the launch of $TRUMP, which had no pre-announcement sales and logged its first purchase 42 seconds after the president posted about it on Truth Social.
$MELANIA meanwhile saw an additional $900,000 worth of tokens purchased in the 42 seconds after it was announced, suggesting a degree of insider knowledge from the biggest buyers.
The first account to purchase $MELANIA bought coins worth $40,000 141 seconds before the launch. It then went on to sell 86 percent of its holdings within 2 hours, making $2.5 million profit.
Although most of the wallets involved in the pre-announcement purchases remain anonymous, the FT has identified the above buyer of them as belonging to Hayden Davis, a 28-year-old crypto entrepreneur from Texas who said he was involved in the launch of $MELANIA.
Davis, who was involved in launching another memecoin, $LIBRA, found himself at the center of a political scandal in February after the currency was briefly endorsed by Argentina’s President Javier Milei, which resulted in a similar price surge followed by a crash.
During an interview with independent crypto journalist Coffeezilla, Davis confirmed he was part of the $MELANIA, and said the team “wanted to snipe it, because of how big the snipe was on $TRUMP,” but added that nobody involved with the launch was “the big sniper.”
“There was no money made from the Melania team. We didn’t take any liquidity out. Zero,” he added.
Crypto exchange platform Arkham Intelligence also revealed that one of the wallets connected to the $MELANIA pre-purchase was once used by Barron Trump. Although there is no evidence he was involved in purchasing his mother’s cryptocoin, the president’s youngest son is a key member of the Trump family’s crypto exchange, the World Liberty Foundation, and is rumored to have created his own Trump-themed digital token with the assistance of “pharma-bro” and convicted felon Martin Shkreli.
Describing his son as a ”blockchain wizard,” Trump said: “Barron knows so much about this. Barron’s a young guy, but he knows—he talks about his [crypto] wallet, he’s got four wallets or something, and I’ll say ‘what is a wallet?’ But he knows it inside out,” the Independent reported at the time.
In total, traders who profited off the launch of $TRUMP have earned at least $350 million in token sales and transaction fees, after the price of Trump’s coin once again surged when he announced that largest holders would be eligible to have dinner with the president.
There are around 800 million remaining $MELANIA coins which were not listed for public sale. According to analysis by the FT, “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.”
The Daily Beast has reached out to Arkham Intel and Melania Trump for comment.
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