The Crypto Exchange That Profited Handsomely From the TRUMP Memecoin

It was the early hours of January 18, two days before Donald Trump was set to return to the White House. Tom had just slumped into bed when his phone

A new memecoin named after former U.S. President Donald Trump has sparked a record $16 billion in cryptocurrency trades on Raydium, a British Virgin Islands-registered platform.

Tom, who leads Raydium and keeps his full name and whereabouts secret, told CoinDesk that the massive trading activity began on January 18 after the TRUMP memecoin was launched. The coin, which is used almost exclusively for financial speculation, saw a huge influx of trades on Solana, the crypto network that hosts the majority of memecoin activity.

Raydium, which is essential to Solana’s trading apparatus, experienced rapid growth last year thanks to the memecoin boom. Now, the platform is set to benefit greatly from the TRUMP memecoin, which is generating a small cut of each trade for Raydium.

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After confirming that TRUMP is not a scam, as some have suggested, Tom is working to ensure that Raydium’s servers can handle the upcoming wave (the platform crashed during a separate memecoin trading frenzy in late 2023). He is also making sure that there is enough of the new coin available on Raydium for people to trade it freely. To do this, he is monitoring how much TRUMP people have voluntarily posted (a practice that earns the supplier a cut of trading fees) and, if necessary, buying it elsewhere to meet demand on the platform himself.

At around 5 am, Tom finally fell back into bed, exhausted. In the chaos, he had forgotten to buy any TRUMP for himself.

As Tom slept, the trades continued to pour in. On January 19, a total of $16 billion in trades were executed on Raydium, which is more than the entire year of 2023. According to Tom, the graph looks “like a hockey stick.”

Despite the massive volume of trades inspired by the TRUMP memecoin, only a small number of traders actually made a profit. The vast majority either lost money or barely broke even.

However, the value is accruing more reliably to the Trump-affiliated company that manages the coin and the crypto service providers – including Raydium – that facilitate memecoin trading. Other components of the “memecoin industrial complex,” as one hedge fund manager once called it, include the Solana network, which hosts the majority of memecoin transactions, companies that provide wallet software for storing coins, liquidity providers that ensure coins can be traded readily, and entities that aggregate pricing data. They all stand to benefit from an increase in trading activity.