With his second term as president beginning on Monday, Donald Trump used the last weekend before he takes office to launch his very own meme coin. “My NEW Official Trump Meme is HERE!” The president-elect announced in a post on X. “It’s time to celebrate everything we stand for: WINNING! Join my very special Trump Community. GET YOUR $TRUMP NOW. Go to http://gettrumpmemes.com — Have Fun!”
The website from the post describes buying the meme as an opportunity to “get your piece of history” to celebrate “a leader who doesn’t back down, no matter the odds.” As of this writing, the volume of trade on the coin since Trump’s announcement yesterday evening has topped $29 billion, with the coin sitting at a current market cap of almost $12 billion according to CoinGecko. The coin reached a peak of $73.43, and is currently trading at just over sixty dollars.
In a cryptocurrency landscape already rife with fraud and dubious practices, meme coins like the one the president-elect is selling are broadly considered a more volatile investment at best, or an outright scam at worst. Also commonly known as “shitcoins,” they are cryptocurrencies built purely on hype that make no claims of intrinsic value of any kind, leaning on the popularity of a funny meme online or a celebrity – or in this case, the president-elect. According to the cryptocurrency analysis firm BDC, around 40% of meme coins are pump-and-dump schemes, and another 30% are so-called “rug-pull” scams where the coin’s creators make off with all the money. They also estimate that the average meme coin peaks and crashes within less than two hours. Despite the market for meme coins ballooning to over $100 billion in 2024, government regulation remains essentially nonexistent.
According to gettrumpmemes.com’s own data on $TRUMP, 80% of the meme coin is controlled by “Creators and CIC Digital,” the latter of which is an entity fully owned by the Donald Trump Revocable Trust. CIC Digital is the vehicle Trump used to launch NFTs, a crypto-adjacent digital asset whose market cratered 2023. The site details how these coins are on a 3-year unlocking schedule, releasing more coins to the public released gradually over that period.
There are already concerns about the coin’s allocation, as the top 10 holders control 89.06%; such concentration is broadly viewed as a sign of a pump-and-dump scheme or rug pull. Enthusiasts in the space are finding themselves conflicted between the signs pointing to a scam on one hand, and the boost that the imprimatur of the president-elect’s involvement means for the meme coin market. “We can see some insider traders involved, but I feel if the US government is supporting projects to set a roadmap for innovation in the country,” says Preetam Rao, head of a Web3 security firm, speaking to the crypto news site Cointelegraph. “Maybe it’s a rug pull, but it lays the foundation for innovation.”
Below all the promotional language and the two buttons to buy the meme coin (with crypto or a debit card), the president-elect’s meme coin site indicates that Trump Memes “are not intended to be, or to be the subject of, an investment opportunity, investment contract, or security of any type.” The text also indicates that CIC Digital “will receive trading revenue derived from trading activities” of the meme coin.
