Donald Trump’s cryptocurrency meme coin had been soaring in value but suddenly suffered a steep drop after his wife Melania Trump launched her own coin.
The former first lady announced her crypto token Sunday afternoon at 4:10pm ET on Truth Social and X, after which $TRUMP tanked roughly 41 percent, according to price tracker CoinMarketCap.
Despite that, Trump reposted both of Melania’s announcements on his social media pages.
$MELANIA is hosted on the Solana blockchain, just like $TRUMP, and can be bought for about $0.09. Her token is much smaller than her husband’s, having a market cap of nearly $4.5 million to Trump’s $8.5 billion.
Shortly after the soon-to-be president announced his meme coin on Friday via Truth Social, his supporters pushed it up to a market cap of $13.3 billion.
The reaction most people had to Melania’s meme launch was one of complete shock.
‘This is beyond insane,’ analysts at The Kobeissi Letter posted to X. ‘Less than 48 hours ago, Donald Trump launched $trump which just erased $7.5 billion in market cap in 10 minutes. In the minutes around the launch of Melania Trump’s token, we saw massive sell orders in $trump.’
‘Looks like crypto is becoming a family business,’ prolific X influencer Mario Nawfal posted.
Meme coins are generally considered to be incredibly risky investments, since they are prone to insider-trading and extreme volatility.
There are thousands of them available for purchase through many different platforms, but the most recent meme coin that has gotten negative media attention was Haliey Welch’s.
Welch, better known as the ‘Hawk Tuah Girl,’ launched $HAWK with the help of a shady foundation on December 4.
The token cratered by over 90 percent just hours after it reached a $490 million market cap, prompting accusations of fraud from the crypto community and a lawsuit against the creators of the coin.
According to Melania’s meme website, 35 percent of the tokens have been distributed to team vesting, 20 percent have gone to both the team’s treasury and community, and 10 percent has gone to liquidity.
Just 15 percent of the tokens are available to purchase for the general public, according to the website.
Over 147,000 crypto wallets have stakes in $MELANIA, according to DEXScreener data. Four wallets hold 85 percent of the token.
In a disclaimer on the website, it says Melania’s meme coin is ‘intended to function as an expression of support for and engagement with the values embodied by the symbol MELANIA.’
The coin is ‘not intended to be, or to be the subject of, an investment opportunity, investment contract, or security of any type,’ according to the website.
Similar disclaimers are present on Trump’s meme coin website, which are almost certainly an attempt to avoid an enforcement action from the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Trump’s meme coin announcement featured an artist rendering of the coin showing Trump pumping his right fist in the air with the slogan, ‘Fight, Fight, Fight.’
‘My new Official Trump Meme is here! It’s time to celebrate everything we stand for: winning!’ the president-elect wrote. ‘Join my very special Trump Community. Get your $Trump now. Go to — Have Fun!’
It features an image of Trump in the moments after an assassination attempt at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13, 2024, when he defiantly threw his hand in the air to show he was unharmed.
Both Melania and Trump’s coins are fungible tokens, meaning that each token is identical and interchangeable with one another. Government-issued currencies like US dollars are considered fungible as well.
Trump has also sold non-fungible tokens in the past, better known as NFTs. They were billed as digital trading cards that featured him in various heroic settings.
The joint announcements came as Trump is set to be inaugurated as the next president on Monday after defeating Vice President Kamala Harris in the November election.
Trump has already announced he’ll be signing a flurry of executive orders on day one of his second presidency, the most anticipated being his decree to save TikTok after it was briefly banned in the US on Saturday.