Trump and Melania Rug Pull the Crypto Market With Their Memecoins

While busy sipping champagne at pre-inauguration galas, US President-Elect Donald Trump and incoming First Lady Melania Trump rearranged the homepages of crypto's most trafficked websites: CoinMarketCap and CoinGecko.

Fresh from pre-inauguration galas where champagne flowed freely, US President-Elect Donald Trump and incoming First Lady Melania Trump rearranged the homepages of crypto’s most trafficked websites: CoinMarketCap and CoinGecko.

Indeed, despite no on-stage announcements and social media-only promotion, the couple’s newly-launched memecoins, TRUMP and MELANIA, rocketed up the industry’s leaderboards.

Many gala attendees had paid tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars to attend the in-person events and received no better information than anyone watching X at home.

Around 9pm New York time on Saturday, Trump launched TRUMP on Solana’s blockchain. Admitting that 80% of the supply was allocated to insiders, purchasers were invited to buy via Moonshot, a fiat-onramp and wallet provider. Centralized exchange listings proliferated immediately.

Debuting below $1 for a few minutes, TRUMP soon rallied for four uninterrupted hours and by 6am the following morning was trading north of $75 per coin.

Still near its peak by 4pm — less than 24 hours into its existence– TRUMP’s market cap reached $15 billion, ranking it the 12th largest asset of the 9.6 million coins tracked at CoinMarketCap.

On a related metric, TRUMP’s fully diluted supply of 1 billion coins trading at $75 apiece gave the memecoin a higher fully diluted valuation than seventh-ranked Dogecoin (DOGE).

TRUMP’s launch also ignited a massive capital rotation into its host Solana. Over the past seven days, Solana’s market capitalization has increased by more than any other top 10 crypto asset.

MELANIA rugs TRUMP

Trump’s wife Melania launched her own memecoin around 4pm New York time on Sunday, causing mass confusion.

Although MELANIA would rally for a similarly uninterrupted four hours, her coin stole attention and instilled fear in TRUMP’s fanbase. Fearing abandonment, more token launches, split attention, and dizzying confusion, TRUMP started to lose billions in market capitalization.

Around the time of Melania’s tweet at 4:14pm New York time, TRUMP started to crash from its then-$72 price to $62 by 4:20pm and $38 10 minutes later.

That 16-minute crash wiped $34 billion in fully diluted market cap off the token’s valuation.

As of midnight, TRUMP remains on the homepage of CoinMarketCap, ranked 18th among 9.6 million coins. MELANIA is ranked 81st.

At their peak, the two coins were worth a combined $88 billion in fully diluted market capitalization. However, as of midnight, they had given back more than one-third of that value.

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