President Donald Trump and His Family Launch Trump-Branded Cryptocurrency

The coin, named $Trump, was initially listed on Friday at a price of $6.54, before eventually skyrocketing to a peak valuation of $73.43 on Sunday.

President Donald Trump and his family have launched their own Trump-branded cryptocurrency just days ahead of his inauguration.

The coin, named $Trump, was initially listed on Friday at a price of $6.54, before eventually skyrocketing to a peak valuation of $73.43 on Sunday. As Axios noted in their coverage, a Trump-affiliated company owns 80% of the coin's supply, meaning that Trump and his associates briefly gained $50 billion in on-paper wealth.

Trump previously called cryptocurrency a scam in 2020, but began to change his tune while on the campaign trail, where he promised to turn the U.S. into the "crypto capital" of the world.

His wife, Melania Trump, also launched her owned eponymously branded cryptocurrency on Sunday night, but it has failed to see the same kind of initial success as her husband's coin.

“I am extremely proud of what we continue to accomplish in crypto,” Eric Trump said in a statement to The New York Times. “$Trump is currently the hottest digital meme on earth.”

While Trump and his supporters largely appear very supportive of his nascent crypto ventures, those in the crypto space as a whole have voiced mixed opinions.

Most notably, critics of the new coin are stating that they feel that the move is merely an attempt by Trump to cash-in on his rabid base of supporters. Specifically, they point to Trump and his associates owning the vast majority of the available coins as a tell-tale sign of a pump-and-dump scheme.

“Trump owning 80 percent and timing launch hours before inauguration is  predatory and many will likely get hurt by it,” writes Nick Tomaino, a former executive at Coinbase, a leading crypto trading platform, on Xitter.