It is important to identify the person who has been acting suspiciously. A well-timed trader who turned $1 million worth of Solana (SOL) into over $116 million by jumping on President Donald Trump’s meme coin launch last month has been unmasked—and new details have surfaced as to how they were able to get in on the token so incredibly quickly. The secret: It wasn’t by chance.
Analysis by On Chain Research Bubblemaps, the trader in question has been identified as Naseem—a notorious, pseudonymous crypto investor and hacker with a reputation in the Solana community for token sniping.
On-chain sleuths were able to uncover Naseem’s identity and discovered an even stranger detail. More than two hour before Trump announced the meme coin, Naseem tried to purchase a large amount of tokens at the contract address.
What is the possibility of that? During any meme coin launch, let alone that of a U.S. president, such signs can indicate that a project was vulnerable to insider trading—meaning certain traders had a heads-up about a token’s legitimacy and launch, which would allow them to buy up coins in the project’s first seconds of existence and see their value balloon as the public began investing.
What was the source of Naseem’s information about Trump’s billion-dollar token launch several hours before its live debut?
The trader, when pressed on the issue by Bubblemaps, claimed that he had no advance warning from any of Trump’s team—but instead manually discovered on-chain evidence that indicated the president was launching a token with the help of one of Solana’s biggest decentralized exchanges.
This alibi might not be true. Bubblemaps told Decrypt Meteora is a Solana-based decentralized exchange which helped to coordinate the TRUMP launch. Its admin account was used to communicate with a pool that was designed to convert TRUMP into USDC, one full day before Trump publicly announced the TRUMP.
By doing so, the Meteora team—whether it intended to or not—implicitly gave a stamp of legitimacy to an official TRUMP token that otherwise could have been made by any random crypto user.
That crucial bit of information, however, was—at the time—an incredibly valuable needle hidden in a haystack of over 100 million seemingly ordinary transactions filtering through the Solana network. Bubblemaps informed Decrypt There is no evidence that other traders spotted and exploited this fact to discover the TRUMP token prior to its public release.
When Naseem tried grabbing TRUMP tokens just hours before Trump first announced the existence of TRUMP via Truth Social the transaction went through. failed—because the TRUMP/USDC pool was not yet toggled active by its admins.
Had the liquidity pool been in place, would other insiders show up and buy the TRUMP tokens before the general public learned about it? Did those traders rush in to grab tokens as soon as the announcement was made by the president, before the public even knew it wasn’t scam? Some mysteries still abound.
Andrew Hayward is the editor
