The Rise and Fall of $TRUMP: How the President Cashed in on Meme Coins

There are many ways in which President Trump is different from his predecessors, but one notable distinction is his willingness to monetize his political success.

President Trump's storefront website offers hundreds of Trump-branded items from hats and T-shirts to wine, chocolates, pickleball gear, Mar-a-Lago flip-flops and gilded Trump Tower Christmas ornaments.

According to Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, the store added 168 new presidential-themed items just between election day and the inauguration.

But in the days leading up to Inauguration Day, the incoming president hit the jackpot. On Jan. 17, Trump launched his very own meme coin, a farcical subclass of cryptocurrency that has no legitimate uses and no intrinsic value. In the two days following the debut of $TRUMP coins, the president's net worth briefly soared to $56 billion before surrendering about half the gains after the soon-to-be First Lady announced her own meme coin called $MELANIA.

The official website for the Trump meme contains a disclaimer warning that the $TRUMP coin is not intended to be an investment but also includes a unique condition: buyers surrender the right to sue the Trump Organization if the venture goes south. Analysis of trading registers showed that nearly half of all purchasers had never bought a crypto asset before.

So how does one create a fortune out of thin air?

Let's start with cryptocurrencies, non-physical assets that exist only in electronic form on a computerized ledger known as a blockchain. Once issued to the public, they trade on electronic platforms analogous to stock exchanges. Bitcoin and Ethereum are the most popular "coins," as they are called (even though no physical coin exists), but according to Coinbase, 1 million new digital currencies are listed every week.

The initial theory behind cryptocurrencies was to replace sovereign currencies like the U.S. dollar. That has not played out and is unlikely for many reasons, but they have certainly gained acceptance as a speculative vehicle. Trump, who once called Bitcoin a scam, reversed course and embraced the concept, welcoming the support of large donors from the crypto industry. Bitcoin's price has surged dramatically since his election victory.

So-called meme coins stand at the intersection of digital currency and satire. They are comical cryptocurrencies based on a particular meme, an idea or behavior that spreads rapidly by imitation (from a Greek word for mime or imitation), usually in the form of a graphic image that gains traction on social media. They are easy to create and have no practical use (unlike Bitcoin, at least in theory) other than entertainment, there are thousands of them, and their average life span is just a few days: 97% of all the meme coins created since 2021 are dead.

The very first meme coin was literally created as a joke. A popular social media meme featured a photo of Shiba Inu, a Japanese hunting dog. The meme was sometimes accompanied by a deliberate misspelling of "dog" as "doge," from an early 2000s cartoon.

In 2013, two software developers, intending to spoof the crypto hype created their own parody digital coin, naming it "Dogecoin" in a nod to the Shiba Inu meme. While they didn't set out to test the greater fool theory, their useless, satirical crypto coin increased in value by 30,000% at its peak in 2021 thanks in large measure to periodic Twitter trolling from Elon Musk. Thousands of new meme coins have appeared since, including offerings like Bonk, Beercoin, Pickle Token, HeeeHeee and Peanut the Squirrel (market value: $250 million). In homage to the abject frivolity of the frenzy, the entire meme coin infrastructure is often referred to by insiders with a common scatological term.

Which brings us to $TRUMP. The president's token was launched by a subsidiary of the Trump Organization on Jan. 17, three days prior to Inauguration Day. It is associated with a meme of a svelte, photoshopped Trump with raised fist overlaid with the words "FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT." One billion coins were created, with 200 million released to the public while the remaining 800,000 were retained by the president. In the hours after the launch, the market value of the tokens in circulation soared to over $14 billion.

The Trump Organization is estimated to have raked in $50-$100 million from the initial release and another $50 million in trading fees, which they are entitled to collect under the terms of the offering. That peak market value of outstanding coins implied a value of $56 billion for the remaining tokens still held by the president, briefly placing him among the 25 wealthiest people on earth. The First Lady's coin launch was much more modest, increasing her net worth by $3 billion, although it has also dropped significantly since the launch.

It is important to note that the president's unrealized profit of $56 billion has already proved ephemeral, as the market price of