FT analysis shows potential windfall for US president in three weeks following launch in January
Donald Trump’s crypto project netted $350mn from presidential memecoin
FT analysis shows potential windfall for US president in three weeks following launch in January
© FT montage/Dreamstime Donald Trump’s crypto project made at least $350mn from the launch of his memecoin, a windfall that is likely to fuel concerns over conflicts of interest arising from the token.
Digital wallets owned by the entities running the scheme earned the money from sales of $TRUMP in the three weeks after it was launched in January, according to a Financial Times analysis of blockchain data.
Trump has faced a fierce backlash since he and his wife Melania launched memecoins, tokens with no practical use whose value is entirely based on speculation, just days before his return to the White House. Investors and ethics experts have said the sale of crypto tokens would in effect allow a way to channel anonymous donations to the president while also exploiting retail investors.
“The president of the United States should not be essentially doing things to profit from his office while in office,” said Tim Massad, adjunct law professor at Georgetown Law School and former chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. “It’s a terrible example.”
In addition to the $350mn earned through selling $TRUMP directly on the Solana blockchain — the digital ledger that underpins most memecoins — more money is likely to have been made from a smaller number of tokens that were distributed for sale on cryptocurrency exchanges such as Binance.
The FT calculated the earnings by analysing the flow of tokens from their creation into official wallets and their subsequent placement for sale on trading platforms on the Solana blockchain.
A feature of these platforms, known as “liquidity pools”, is that third parties are able to discern both prices for individual transactions and how much money has accrued in the pool. People who participate in them can earn money from selling tokens and receive fees for providing liquidity to the market. The $TRUMP earnings were made up of $314mn from the sale of the tokens and $36mn from fees.
The White House and Gettrumpmemes.com, the website of the memecoin, did not respond to requests for comment.
The president’s personal profit is unclear. The website states that “CIC Digital LLC, an affiliate of The Trump Organization”, and Fight Fight Fight LLC, a Delaware company, collectively own 80 per cent of the tokens.
The website states that while the product is officially endorsed by the president, the project is being run by Fight Fight Fight and “is not distributed or sold by Donald J. Trump, The Trump Organization or any of their respective affiliates or principals”.
Trump has positioned himself as a pro-crypto president, and will host many of the industry’s biggest companies and investors at a summit at the White House on Friday.
At launch, a Trump account minted a billion $TRUMP tokens and set aside 200mn to be released as a first batch. The remaining 800mn are scheduled to be released over the next three years.
Ad for Trump coin The $TRUMP coin team appears to be conscious of the danger of a price crash Of the initial 200mn, some 158mn coins were deposited into a liquidity pool. This allowed traders to buy the Trump tokens on the open market in exchange for USDC, a stablecoin widely used in crypto markets as a substitute for the dollar.
The blockchain analysis shows Trump wallets later withdrew the USDC they had earned from the sale of the tokens, then placed $291mn worth of USDC back on to another liquidity pool — a move that would help support the market.
The scheme is likely to have made more money from other transactions. They sent about 14.7mn Trump coins to 10 different cryptocurrency exchanges including Binance, Bybit and Coinbase. Trump-linked wallets currently hold 31mn of the original 200mn.
While the value of $TRUMP soared to a high of $75 a token, FT analysis shows the first 100mn tokens were sold before the price reached $1.05.
The value of the coin has since plunged 82 per cent from its peak to trade about $13, meaning the stock of 831mn $TRUMP coins held by Trump-linked accounts currently has a notional value of $10.8bn.
The president has faced criticism for encouraging retail traders to buy a volatile token. “GET YOUR $TRUMP NOW,” he posted on social media platform X in January, alongside a link to the website.
He has also paved the way for other government officials to promote other memecoins, which give holders a claim to nothing except their belief in the promoter, and whose values have also plunged.
The presidents of the Central African Republic and Argentina last month both publicly touted new crypto tokens, only for their values to rapidly collapse, leaving thousands of investors facing losses.
The $TRUMP coin team appears to be conscious of the danger of a price crash. When Melania Trump launched her own token — known as $MELANIA — two days later, it sent the price of $TRUMP plunging.
As the price of $TRUMP dropped, they spent $1mn on buying their own token at $33.23 apiece in an apparent attempt to stabilise the price, the FT found.
Nicolas Vaiman, chief executive of analytics firm Bubblemaps, said it appears “they wanted to protect the price”. He added: “It’s something that is pretty [common] in crypto as a whole: using their own treasury to defend the charts.”
Trump and Melania’s tokens also inspired more than 700 copycats seeking to profit from association with the presidential family, the FT previously revealed.
How the FT calculated the $TRUMP earnings
The FT analysed data from the Solana blockchain, following the movement of Trump coin from its creation on January 17 to the end of its first few weeks of trading.
The coin’s initial distribution was primarily managed by four accounts, which set up a “liquidity pool” on Meteora, a decentralised exchange, in order to sell most of that initial distribution.
The FT downloaded the full transaction history of these accounts during this period, as well as the transactions within the liquidity pool. From this we have been able to reconstruct how the coin was traded and at what prices.
The $350mn is a floor estimate. More money would have been made via sales on other platforms. It is not possible to calculate how much was made from transactions that took place off the blockchain.