Talk about a Friday night surprise. President-elect Donald Trump’s social media accounts shared what appears to be an official Solana meme coin called TRUMP, just three days before he’s set to be sworn in for his second term in the White House.
Degen traders bought in immediately, generating hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of trading volume as on-chain sleuths and security experts hunted for red flags. But with Trump’s X and Truth Social posts still live after more than an hour, and some initial red flags cleared upon closer inspection, it appears that this is a legitimate Trump meme coin launch.
“My NEW Official Trump Meme is HERE! It’s time to celebrate everything we stand for: WINNING! Join my very special Trump Community. GET YOUR $TRUMP NOW,” Trump’s official X account posted.
My NEW Official Trump Meme is HERE! It’s time to celebrate everything we stand for: WINNING! Join my very special Trump Community. GET YOUR $TRUMP NOW. Go to https://t.co/GX3ZxT5xyq — Have Fun! pic.twitter.com/flIKYyfBrC
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 18, 2025
The launch was immediately met with excitement, confusion, and plenty of skepticism. That’s because the project had all the familiar hallmarks of many celebrity meme coin scams that have launched over the last year, with a public figure’s social media account hijacked to promote a pump-and-dump scam.
The Truth Social post went out first, but once the X post followed on his official account, concerns began to subside. Also, the coin has mostly only pumped so far, with no dump as of this writing.
Trump still could be going through a third party to create/manage. If so, he should use US exchanges. We have good coins, the best coins
— Conor (@jconorgrogan) January 18, 2025
On-chain sleuths pointed to potential red flags, including the apparent fact that the project was seeded with millions of dollars of funds from Binance and Gate—two exchanges that don’t serve U.S. customers. But some other apparent concerns diminished with further sleuthing, not to mention with time as Trump’s social posts remained online.
The coin’s official website looks similar to those used to sell and promote his past NFT collections, and is credited to CIC Digital, the same official Trump licensee behind the NFTs. The meme coin website was “deployed almost identically to his previous NFT website,” noted pseudonymous blockchain engineer cygaar tweeted, following initial suspicions.
“Either this is the greatest cyber heist of all time, or this is legitimate,” he added.
The fact that both deployments are using Heroku really leads me to believe that this is the same deployer lmao.
Only old heads from a decade ago use Heroku for website deployments.
Either this is the greatest cyber heist of all time, or this is legitimate.
— cygaar (@0xCygaar) January 18, 2025
Meme coin traders are buying the coin in droves, pushing it to a price of $7.31 as of this writing. DexScreener lists a market cap of $7.1 billion, which would make it a top 30 cryptocurrency if accurate—though there’s a caveat.
Out of 1 billion coins, the website notes that 80% are locked and will gradually be unlocked over the course of three years. As such, the circulating supply would only be 200 million tokens, putting the market cap closer to $1.5 billion as of this writing. There’s been about $680 million worth of trading volume so far.
Trump ran on a pro-crypto platform, and beyond his previous NFT collections that launched between 2022 and 2024, Trump has also backed a decentralized finance platform called World Liberty Financial.
He’s expected to issue a day-one executive order regarding cryptocurrency that could be the first of many, as Decrypt reported this week, with Trump believed to be readying directives that could reshape the American crypto landscape for builders and investors alike.
