How Ripple, Novogratz and MoonPay Helped Trump’s Solana Meme Coin Succeed

The trio’s collaboration, which was detailed by the MoonPay President Keith Grossman on the ”When Shift Happens” podcast, required MoonPay CEO Ivan Soto-Wright to “sign away his life” and the company to “promise” it had no liens on its reserve funds.

“The volumes were just gigantic,” Grossman said, “All of the liquidity that we use to sort of wire the crypto was locked in BlackRock accounts in a traditional finance sort of manner… and it’s Saturday.”

The crypto funds it did have handy were being used up rapidly thanks to the Trump meme coin team’s direction that users could use mobile meme coin trading app, Moonshot, for which MoonPay is the exclusive crypto payments provider.

Moonshot simplifies the meme coin buying process, allowing users to sign up with an email address, and allowing them to fund their accounts with credit or debit cards. The app eschews the complexities that crypto novices may face with trading on-chain via decentralized exchanges, making it an ideal option for newcomers.

Therefore, when new users were looking to buy the TRUMP token on the app, they were exchanging their funds for MoonPay’s crypto reserves, notably stablecoin USDC, which was then used to purchase Trump’s meme coin on the Solana blockchain.

If the company didn’t have the liquidity to continue facilitating purchases of the token, then new consumers—of which MoonPay says it onboarded 750,000 of during the week of the TRUMP launch—may not have been able to gain access to the token. That may have hindered the token’s rapid growth in the early days, and impacted other MoonPay users as well.

Grossman said the app would’ve said, “Sorry, doesn’t work,” had MoonPay run out of funds.

To avoid the issue, Grossman said that he and Soto-Wright worked with MoonPay CFO Mouna Siala to forecast the amount of funds it would require, with the initial estimate of $50 million quickly doubling to $100 million after reevaluating the token’s growth in the first 24 hours.

With its reserves locked in traditional financial systems, Grossman said he texted Galaxy’s Mike Novogratz, and after a brief conversation, a loan was agreed upon and underway, forcing MoonPay’s teams to scramble on paperwork while verifying it had the funds to pay back a loan thanks to a connection through BlackRock.

But the $100 million wasn’t enough. As demand continued to surge for TRUMP the following day, Grossman said that MoonPay turned to Ripple Labs CEO Brad Garlinghouse.

“We underestimated the demand of this Trump token,” the MoonPay team told Garlinghouse, per Grossman.

The Ripple chief agreed to help if MoonPay could get Novogratz to agree to the arrangement, given the previous deal in place—and ultimately, Grossman said, the additional $60 million was sent by Ripple to Galaxy, and then ultimately transferred to MoonPay.

As traditional financial players came online in Europe and the United States on the following Monday and Tuesday, MoonPay was able to reestablish access to its funds, paying back its loans in full by Tuesday afternoon according to Grossman.

The TRUMP token saw more than $20 billion in trading volume on average across its first five days after launch, according to data from CoinGecko, growing quickly to a fully diluted valuation of more than $73 billion in less than 48 hours.

In the days after its launch, Trump’s meme coin gained spot listings from notable centralized exchanges like Binance and Coinbase, further aiding the ability for inexperienced users to gain access to the token.

A MoonPay representative confirmed to Decrypt that Grossman’s telling of the situation was accurate, though representatives from Galaxy and Ripple did not immediately reply to Decrypt’s requests for comment.

TRUMP is now trading at $15.37, down more than 79% from its all time high.

Edited by Andrew Hayward