Trump Launches His Own Cryptocurrency, a Meme Coin Named $TRUMP

Fresh off President Donald Trump’s second inauguration a couple of days prior, last Friday saw the launch of his own cryptocurrency, a meme coin aptly named $TRUMP.

Amid the ceremonial fanfare, the coin’s value skyrocketed by over 300 percent over the weekend. As of Thursday, the market capitalization of $TRUMP is hovering around $7 billion with only 200 million of the 1 billion tokens yet released. The remaining 800 million tokens are owned by Fight Fight Fight and CIC Digital, an affiliate of the Trump Organization. At the coin’s current value, Trump has a total stake exceeding $30 billion, or over three times his suspected net worth of $7.5 to $10 billion, though that’s all on paper, of course.

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Meme coins often disappear as quickly as they rise in value, frequently leaving hoodwinked investors—rather than, say, Trump—holding the bag. Perhaps that’s why $TRUMP’s website has a clear disclaimer declaring the coin an artwork.

“TrumpMemes are intended to function as an expression of support for, and engagement with, the ideals and beliefs embodied by the symbol ‘$TRUMP’ and the associated artwork, and are not intended to be, or to be the subject of, an investment opportunity, investment contract, or investment of any type,” it reads.

(A cryptocurrency is typically labeled a meme coin if it has no intrinsic function but originates from an internet meme, like DOGE coin. In contrast, the coin Ether is used to trade on the blockchain platform Ethereum, which allows users to build smart contracts, among a host of other applications.)

In a LinkedIn post on Tuesday, Georg Bak, a digital art advisor and co-founder of The Digital Art Mile art fair, noted the disclaimer and declared that Trump had issued “the most expensive artwork ever created in the world.” The meme coin, he went on, is valued far higher than Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi—the generally accepted highest valued artwork, which sold for $450 million in 2017. Because $TRUMP was classified as art by the issuer, Bak continued, it is therefore an “artwork co-owned by thousands of coin holders and can be regarded as a tokenized artwork.”

“Each holder of the $TRUMP is a legit co-owner of the currently most valuable artwork in the world,” Bak stated. “It is almost grotesque that art is once again serving as a proxy for carrying out otherwise illegal activities in a clean manner. While most types of coins are under strict supervision, art and therefore all meme coins enjoy artistic freedom, a fundamental right of humanity.”

After seeing Bak’s post, ARTnews asked the advisor why Trump might have categorized the coin as art. Bak speculated that the decision likely has less to do with Trump’s secret desire to be an artist than the legal protections such a declaration can afford the issue.

“Labeling [$TRUMP] as art can provide certain protections, avoid legal challenges, or redefine its purpose in ways that align with legal or regulatory frameworks,” Bak said. “One of the biggest legal challenges for cryptocurrencies and meme coins is being classified as a security under financial regulations like the Howey Test [a standard set by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1946]. If a coin is deemed a security, it must comply with strict regulations that require registration, disclosures, and compliance measures. By declaring a meme coin as art or as a cultural product, its creators can argue that it is not an investment vehicle but a collectible or a creative expression.”

Andres Guadamuz, a reader in Intellectual Property Law at the University of Sussex, similarly told ARTnews that classifying a meme coin like $TRUMP as art “is usually a legal workaround, a clever ploy if you will.”

“Some meme coins projects try to avoid being labeled as securities, so they slip in language describing their tokens as ‘art’ or ‘collectibles.’ That way, they can argue that they’re selling a digital artwork rather than offering an investment product,” Guadamuz said. “While regulators in the new administration may not come knocking, this ensures that projects can be future-proof. People can sell and trade art with practically no regulation, and this is easier to do because of NFTs—tokens as art have a precedent that was left mostly unregulated. But if you’re selling a token as an investment vehicle,