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At least one group of crypto enthusiasts have done rather well out of Donald Trump’s presidency: the Trumps themselves. On Friday, we reported that the entities behind the official $TRUMP memecoin had made a tidy sum in the first three weeks:
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.
The whole thing is a bit mind-boggling.
Most of the money involved is still parked in a liquidity pool: it is still supporting the price of the coin, which is currently trading at $11, but it is theirs. It makes sense for the Trumps to support the price: the stock of 831mn $TRUMP coins still held by Trump-linked accounts currently has a notional value of $9.3bn.
All of that for tokens that do . . . nothing? According to the official website, they exist as “an expression of support for, and engagement with, the ideals and beliefs embodied by the symbol ‘$TRUMP’ and the associated artwork”. But, the terms and conditions tell us, they are “not political and has nothing to do with any political campaign or any political office”.
But let’s go back to that top quote and note those journalese weasel words: we said the sales were worth “at least” $350mn.
In truth, they could be a lot more.
Our bit of maths about how much they made was related to 158mn tokens distributed through liquidity pools, a feature on the Solana blockchain, which made up more than 90 per cent of the tokens sold so far. What of that little group of missing tokens?
As we wrote:
They sent about 14.7mn Trump coins to 10 different cryptocurrency exchanges including Binance, Bybit and Coinbase.
We don’t know the terms on which these little wedges were sent out and — despite their small number — they could really matter.
The reason why is that the initial distribution of $TRUMP coins saw them sell off extremely rapidly. The memecoiners had to make four big top ups in the first two hours to meet demand for the coins in the main liquidity pool.
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Prices were not just buoyant through this process — they surged. But this meant that the overwhelming majority of the coins were sold by the scheme organisers when the prices were, compared with what came next, pretty low.
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The first 100mn tokens of the 158mn were sold for $0.47 per token. A second Trump account, which joined the fray later, earned $5.10 per token. And a third, which followed on later still, earned $24.20 apiece.
The additional 14.7mn tokens were sent to exchanges from 9:41am on 18 January, a point after which the lowest price was $11.23. We do not know about the terms on which they were transferred — nor when, or how, prices were fixed. These transfers might have been deliveries of tokens agreed much earlier at lower prices.
But 14.7mn tokens at that price would be another $165.1mn. The amount could plausibly be even more: 4.5mn of the tokens were transferred to a Binance account when the price was above $60 per token.
When he was asked about $TRUMP by reporters, Trump said “I don’t know much about it other than I launched it, other than it was very successful.”
It’s hard to disagree.
