A Liquidity Pool Sale, Not a Straight Dump
President Trump’s team received the funds by adding and removing liquidity tied to $TRUMP over a 10-hour window rather than dumping tokens directly onto an exchange order book. The method was something that the team had used before, i.e. seeding Solana liquidity pools with $TRUMP-only positions at target prices, then letting market buyers trigger an automatic swap into $USDC as the token climbs through those levels.
To this point, the exact technique had been deployed last year in April when developers quietly pulled 4.6 million $USDC from a liquidity pool just ahead of a scheduled token unlock.
$TRUMP, which launched on Solana on January 17, 2025, as the first memecoin issued by a sitting U.S. president, changed hands at $2.46 at the time of writing, up 75% over the past week, with a market capitalization of $629.5 million and $864.3 million in 24-hour trading.
Many More Transactions of This Nature Took Place This Week
The past few days have seen such sales emanate from different wallets. On August 23, the Official Trump team moved roughly 646,000 $TRUMP tokens, worth about $15.5 million OKX (via two seperate transactions). Subsequently, another transfer saw 2.62 million tokens worth $6.2 million being moved.
Moreover, Bitcoin.com News reported in May that Trump Media transferred 2,650 bitcoin worth roughly $205 million to Crypto.com, a move the company’s leadership never ruled out as balance-sheet monetization. Separately, World Liberty Financial, the Trump family’s other crypto venture, sold 5.9 billion WLFI tokens to private buyers without notifying earlier backers, a deal from which the Trump family collected 75% of proceeds.
A Token Far off Its Highs, Searching for Direction
$TRUMP’s price trajectory has been extremely rocky since its debut, as the token initially spiked above $73 within just 2 days of its launch (before shedding the vast majority of its value). Also, a couple of months ago, the token’s core dev team cumulatively moved 48.25 million tokens, worth roughly $172.4 million, across three separate batches over five months, with $TRUMP’s price falling more than 66% across that same stretch.
The steady selling has fueled proposals to prop the token back up as Trump promoter Bill Zanker’s firm, Fight Fight Fight LLC, has been pursuing a fundraising push of at least $200 million (potentially scaling to $1 billion) to launch a digital asset treasury company dedicated to buying $TRUMP on the open market, according to Bloomberg. That plan remains unconfirmed and has not closed as of this writing.
Looking ahead, the latest withdrawals are indicative of the fact that insiders are extracting value even as retail traders bid the token higher, an aspect that has defined the memecoin’s volatile first year and a half on the market.
