As the political spectacle surrounding President-elect Trump’s return to The White House continues, just days before his inauguration, a cryptic post on X and Truth Social unveiled his cryptocurrency, the $TRUMP meme coin. With nearly 100m followers on X, an explosive wave of social media hype and frenzied trading drove the coin to a fully diluted valuation, calculated on its total supply of 1 billion tokens, to north of $26 billion in the first day of trading. The meteoric rise catapulted $TRUMP to the upper ranks of cryptocurrencies by market capitalisation, with close to $7bn of trading volume in the first 24 hours of the coins launched.
While crypto market valuations were already somewhat frothy, the $TRUMP coin launch further underlined Trump’s apparent commitment to the crypto space, delivering a significant boost to the broader cryptocurrency market, particularly Solana, the blockchain platform hosting the token. Following the launch, Solana saw a sharp rise in transaction volumes and network activity as the coin's popularity surged, with a 15% increase in Solana's native SOL token price within 48 hours, buoyed by heightened interest in the platform's ability to support high-throughput projects like $TRUMP.
Despite not being the Trump team’s first foray into the world of crypto, which began with Trump-branded non-fungible tokens (NFTs), this latest move marks a deepening of Trump’s involvement in cryptocurrency. The coin is managed by CIC Digital LLC, a Trump Organization affiliate, and retains 80% of its supply, considerably magnifying Trump’s financial exposure to the coin’s success. However, the timing of the launch, so close to his inauguration, invites scrutiny over whether his policy decisions on cryptocurrencies and financial regulation could benefit his new ventures following this launch.
Understandably, supporters and crypto proponents argue that Trump’s embrace of crypto could signify a policy environment conducive to digital asset growth, potentially fostering regulatory clarity and encouraging wider adoption, including a US crypto reserve. However, the potential for crypto policy changes to be perceived as catering to the Trump Team’s self-interest and profit-seeking could overshadow genuine policy considerations. Whether $TRUMP will prove to be a fleeting trend or a lasting symbol of a new financial-political paradigm remains to be seen, however, significant changes to crypto policy are all but guaranteed in the months ahead.