A Friday evening 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's set to be sworn in for his second term in the White House.
Degen traders bought in immediately, generating hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of trading volume as on-chain sleuths and security experts hunted for red flags. But with Trump's X and Truth Social posts still live after more than an hour, and some initial red flags cleared upon closer inspection, it appears that this is a legitimate Trump meme coin launch.
"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 $TRUMP NOW," Trump's official X account posted.
Launch was met immediately with confusion, excitement and skepticism. That's because the project had all the familiar hallmarks of many celebrity meme coin scams that have launched over the last year, with a public figure's social media account hijacked to promote a pump-and-dump scam.
Concerns began to diminish after the X posted on his official page. As of the time this article was written, there has been a largely pumping out, and no dump.
On-chain sleuths pointed to potential red flags, including the apparent fact that the project was seeded with millions of dollars of funds from Binance and Gate—two exchanges that don't serve U.S. customers. But some other apparent concerns diminished with further sleuthing, not to mention with time as Trump's social posts remained online.
The coin's official website looks similar to those used to sell and promote his past NFT collections, and is credited to CIC Digital, the same official Trump licensee behind the NFTs. The website for the meme coin was "deployed almost identically to his previous NFT website," Following initial suspicions, cygaar noted that a pseudonymous Blockchain engineer tweeted.
"Either this is the greatest cyber heist of all time, or this is legitimate," He added.
The coin is being bought by meme coin traders in large numbers, which has pushed it up to $7.31 at the time of writing. DexScreener lists a market cap of $7.1 billion, which would make it a top 30 cryptocurrency if accurate—though there's a caveat.
Website notes that 80 percent of one billion coins are locked. They will slowly be unlocked in three years. Accordingly, there would be only 200 million tokens in circulation, and the market cap at the time of writing was closer to $1.5billion. There's been about $680 million worth of trading volume so far.
Trump was a crypto-supporter in his campaign. Beyond the previous NFT collections he launched between 2022-2024, Trump also supported a decentralized financial platform named World Liberty Financial.
He's expected to issue a day-one executive order regarding cryptocurrency that could be the first of many, as Decrypt Trump was believed to have been preparing a set of directives this week that would reshape American crypto for investors and developers alike.
