Talk about a Friday night surprise. Newly elected President Donald Trump’s social media accounts shared what appears to be an official Solana meme coin called TRUMP just three days before he is sworn in for his second term in the White House.
Degen traders immediately bought in, generating hundreds of millions of dollars worth of trading volume as sleuths and security experts hunted the chain for warning signs. But with Trump’s
“My NEW official Trump meme is HERE! It’s time to celebrate everything we stand for: WINNING! Join my very special Trump community. GET YOURS $TRUMP NOW,” Trump’s official X account said.
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. Visit https://t.co/GX3ZxT5xyq — Enjoy! pic.twitter.com/flIKYyfBrC
– Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 18, 2025
The launch was immediately met with excitement, confusion and a lot of skepticism. That’s because the project had all the familiar hallmarks of many celebrity meme coin scams launched over the past year, involving the hijacking of a public figure’s social media account to promote a pump-and-dump scam.
The Truth Social post went out first, but as soon as the X post followed on his official account, concerns started to subside. Furthermore, the currency has largely just pumped so far, with no dumping taking place at the time of writing.
Trump could still use a third party to create/manage this. If so, he should use US exchanges. We have good coins, the best coins
— Conor (@jconorgrogan) January 18, 2025
Investigators on the chain pointed to possible red flags, including the apparent fact that the project was seeded with millions of dollars in funds from Binance and Gate – two exchanges that do not serve US clients. But some other apparent concerns diminished with further sleuthing, not to mention the fact that Trump’s social posts remained online over time.
The coin’s official website appears similar to the one used to sell and promote its previous NFT collections, and is attributed to CIC Digital, the same official Trump licensee behind the NFTs. The meme coin website was “implemented almost identically to his previous NFT website,” pseudonymous blockchain engineer Cygaar tweeted after initial suspicions.
“Either this is the biggest cyber heist of all time, or this is legitimate,” he added.
The fact that both implementations use Heroku really makes me believe this is the same implementer, lmao.
Only old heads from ten years ago use Heroku for website implementations.
Either this is the biggest cyber heist of all time, or this is legitimate.
— cygaar (@0xCygaar) January 18, 2025
Meme coin traders are buying the coin en masse, pushing it to a price of $7.31 at the time of writing. DexScreener lists a market cap of $7.1 billion, which if accurate would make it a top 30 cryptocurrency – although there is a caveat.
Of the 1 billion coins, the website notes that 80% are locked and will be gradually unlocked over three years. As such, the circulating supply would only be 200 million tokens, bringing the market cap closer to $1.5 billion at the time of writing. To date, there has been approximately $680 million in trading volume.
Trump ran on a pro-crypto platform, and in addition to his previous NFT collections launched between 2022 and 2024, Trump has also backed a decentralized finance platform called World Liberty Financial.
He is expected to issue an executive order regarding cryptocurrency on day one, which could be the first of many Declutter reported this week, with Trump likely preparing guidelines that could reshape the U.S. crypto landscape for builders and investors alike.
