HomeTop StoriesWith Trump's digital coins, billions of dollars – and the credibility of...

With Trump’s digital coins, billions of dollars – and the credibility of cryptocurrencies – are at stake

Donald and Melania Trump arrive at the Commander in Chief Ball in Washington, DC on Monday.

The creation of billions of dollars in digital wealth for the Trump Organization began Friday with a social media post.

At 9:44 PM ET, then-President-elect announced the creation of a new digital token: $TRUMP.

“My NEW official Trump meme is HERE! It’s time to celebrate everything we stand for: WINNING!” Donald Trump’s X account has been posted. “Join my very special Trump community. GET YOUR $TRUMP NOW. Go to http://gettrumpmemes.com – Have fun!”

The announcement came with little fanfare. But what would happen in the coming days — including wild price swings and Melania Trump’s own digital token — would roil the crypto community, including some Trump supporters, just as he was set to return to the Oval Office.

The $TRUMP and $MELANIA tokens, as they are called on social media, belong to the crypto category known as memecoins: digital assets that use blockchain technology similar to bitcoin.

Since there are no assets like the underlying cash flows that back memecoins like $TRUMP and $MELANIA, anyone who owns them will only make money if they sell them at a higher price than they bought them for.

That includes the coin makers – and Trump and his family – themselves.

While memecoins have long been part of the crypto universe, they have seen a resurgence in recent months after Trump emerged victorious in November and promised to embrace blockchain technology and crypto markets.

In the case of $TRUMP and $MELANIA, the coins were launched on Solana, a blockchain that collects fees to process transactions and is known for its faster throughput, meaning it is less likely to crash when transaction volumes are high. It is not clear who was aware of their launch before it took place, aside from the developers of the coins and the Trump Organization.

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The many recent launches of memecoins have led to new skepticism and warnings about scams due to the free nature of memecoins. Because they are not formal investment vehicles, they are almost completely unregulated, and anyone can start one under any name at any time, often for free. Platforms like CoinMarketCap that track digital tokens showed dozens of duplicate TRUMP coins.

Bloomberg News summarized the sale of memecoins as “the crystallization of ‘greater fools’ investing, of an asset that is only worth what someone else is willing to pay for it at a given point in time.”

“I’m not sure people fully understand how much of the crypto world is reacting to the Trump memecoin launches,” Molly White, a software engineer and cryptocurrency chronicler, posted on X alongside screenshots of reactions that ranged from frustration to anger.

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