No one expects a meme coin to have a particularly long shelf life. But the fall of Donald Trump’s token, $TRUMP, has been spectacular even by his own vaunted standards.
The Solana-based token launched ahead of Trump’s second inauguration in January last year, and almost immediately surged to a high of over $75 — a spectacular jump in paper wealth that boosted Trump up the echelons of the world’s wealthiest people. Unfortunately for both the president himself and his acolytes who bought into the coin, though, it’s been on a downward trajectory that mirrors their dear leader’s approval ratings ever since.
On Tuesday night, $TRUMP fell to a measly $2.87 — its lowest point yet, Decrypt reported — and a staggering 96 percent plummet from its all-time high. By press time, it was down even further to $2.73.
$TRUMP’s ill fortunes come amid a downturn for cryptocurrencies at large, including Bitcoin, which has plummeted by over 38 percent in the past six months. Unlike the presidential meme coin, though, Bitcoin has shown recent signs of potentially recovering some value.
That a sitting president has a meme coin in his name at all is a clear conflict of interest that should be a major scandal in its own right. Adding to the sleaziness of the venture is that it very likely was used to sucker many of Trump’s followers out of their money. An early group of investors who bought the token at dirt cheap prices immediately after it was officially announced cashed out just days later, pocketing nearly $700 million. One who made an account just hours before Trump launched the coin walked away with $109 million.
The sudden sell-offs by the early big money investors led to the coin’s price collapsing, reeking of a common crypto scam called a “rug pull,” in which a schemer hypes up their new coin, convinces people to buy into it to boost its value, and then suddenly sells their stake in it. The schemer makes out with bags of money, while the followers are left with nearly worthless assets.
Whether the Trump family was directly involved in a rug pull, it made gangbusters business, raking in over $100 million in trading fees in just two weeks post-launch. As of January, the Financial Times reported that the $TRUMP coin, and it the First Lady’s $MELANIA that followed, have generated about $427mn in sales and trading fees.
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