2025 Cryptocurrency and Meme Coin Market Starts the Year With a Bang

A digital assets trader managed to turn a $2,000 investment into more than $3 million in profit within just 10 hours on January 5, 2025, according to data Finbold retrieved from Solscan. The trader used 10 Solana (SOL) – worth just over $2,000 – to purchase 22 million Hyperfly (HYPER) in the afternoon.

Shortly after acquiring the meme coin, they began selling it, offloading nearly 18 million HYPER for 10,286 SOL (~$2.21 million). The remaining cryptocurrency is still valued at another $1 million, which could further increase the trader's total profit to $3 million – a 1,500x return on investment.

This trade is the latest in a string of spectacular New Year meme coin maneuvers. So far, the most dramatic example came already on January 1 when one trader sold KEKIUS MAXIMUS, which they acquired some 18 days earlier for just $66, for a total of $3 million.

The incredible trade was made possible by a joke made by the billionaire owner of X, Elon Musk. Specifically, Musk decided to get festive by changing his social media name and profile picture to the aforementioned Kekius Maximus, a variant of the popular meme frog Pepe.

Indeed, the billionaire’s decision rendered multiple meme coin trades wildly successful, as Finbold reported about an investor who turned $55,000 into $1 million on December 31 and of a trader who made $970,000 from just $4,300 on the very same day.

While most meme coin trades lead to massive losses – as best exemplified by the ill-fated launch of Hailey Welch’s official cryptocurrency or by the downfall of Andrew Tate’s Daddy Tate (DADDY) – the successes have been substantial enough that one group of savvy investors have become increasingly involved with the action: Congressional Traders.

The most prolific of them, at least based on the publicly available information at press time on January 6, is Representative Mike Collins of Georgia's 10th congressional district. While Collins has been buying a wide variety of coins of tokens – including some big names such as Ethereum (ETH) – since late 2023, his most recent trades of a meme coin called Ski Mask Dog (SKI) drew much attention.

The Representative’s profits – estimated at about $60,000 on a $45,000 investment – and the small market capitalization of the cryptocurrency caused much suspicion among observers and copy traders in December and January.