I woke up Saturday morning and realized I had a puzzle to reverse engineer. My portfolio was looking up only the night before; I turned in for an early bed but I woke up and saw simply red: blood everywhere. Most majors were down but not ded, so WTF? I checked the other charts and saw some scammy TRUMP coin with a billion-dollar market cap, but didn’t think much of it — Trump scam coins are literally launched every day, and some of those manufacture ridiculous market caps to try and look like legit moons.
So why was my meme port down 10–50%? And why was Solana pushing all-time highs? It was then that I checked Telegram and realized that Donald Trump, who will be sworn in Monday as President of the United States of America, had launched an Official Trump Memecoin three days before his inauguration. By the time I had made breakfast, TRUMP was one of the most valuable crypto assets on the planet, with a market valuation of over $6 billion, gaining nearly 17,000% in a matter of hours. There’s crypto, and then there’s crypto at the Speed of Trump.
What’s This Mean For Crypto?
Trump is coming into office as the first pro-crypto president in U.S. history. Whatever you think of Trump launching a coin, this isn’t new territory for him. He has his NFT collection on Polygon, and World Liberty, his Ethereum-based DeFi project. What Trump has done is much bigger than him, even if that’s hard to imagine. I didn't hold any TRUMP when I began this article, but I do now, so maybe some bag-bias here, but here are a few quick takeaways from the morning after:
All other coins were vamped within minutes of TRUMP launching, and basically every token of every kind was being sold or swapped for TRUMP. The one exception was SOL — being what most use to buy TRUMP — and at one point it blew past its own high while obliterating the SOL/ETH pairing, which has been up only since mid-2023.
One of the main questions is whether this opens the door for celebrities of all kinds to begin launching “official” memecoins. We’ve seen a number of b-list celebrities and people famous for being dicks launch coins in 2024. It’s hard to imagine this number doesn’t increase dramatically in the coming months.
The TRUMP launch wasn’t a low-liquidity pump.fun token; it was launched with enormous liquidity, more than nearly every token ever made. With a market cap of $5.7 billion, there’s $500 million in liquidity. That’s just not heard of; it’s never been done before.
This matches TradFi levels of liquidity. PEPE used to be the top liquidity meme at $64 million. Now it can’t even see TRUMP through that coin’s dust.
Such deep liquidity satisfies one of TradFi’s biggest complaints about investing in crypto – that there isn’t enough liquidity to make large trades without destroying the market for the token. TRUMP is a memecoin built to be bought by institutions. In fact, it seems like that has to be part of the plan. You want to show allegiance to Trump, buy a shitload of TRUMP.
That TRUMP launched on Solana solidifies that network’s dominance this cycle. If there were any questions left unanswered there, there shouldn’t be anymore. Solana is the network where action happens.
That said, World Liberty deployed on Ethereum. This makes sense, as World Liberty is a DeFi protocol. Ethereum is the home of DeFi and Solana is the home of memecoins, so these choices reveal that Trump’s team knows enough about crypto to know which chains to use for which projects.
At some point very soon, the market will normalize to this new world and liquidity will begin to flow back to other tokens in earnest. Solana memes should benefit most from this waterfall of profits, but just as we saw nearly all assets drop, most will recover. Those that don’t recover quickly, well, the writing’s probably on the wall. I know I’ll be jeeting a few long-term bags after this.
I swung between bearish and bullish in the first hours after the launch, but have since come to the conclusion that this is incredibly bullish for crypto over a long timeframe. TRUMP partnered with Moonshot, a user-friendly crypto app that requires zero knowledge of wallets or keys and enables anyone to buy crypto with a debit card. In fact, the alpha hit Moonshot before anywhere else. Those in the trenches have been wondering whether Moonshot is this cycle’s Robinhood; I think TRUMP provides an affirmative response to that question.
As of 8pm UTC on Saturday, Moonshot is the 48th most popular download in Apple’s App Store and #1 in the Finance category. The amount of TRUMP traffic through that app is pretty crazy at ~$170 million, nearly 1/15 of the total volume at present:
Dune
But the number of Moonshot users is what’s truly to behold. All herald the long-lost retail investor:
Non-crypto folks are probably in for a ride, as whales dump on new buyers in the short term, but over a longer time span TRUMP will onboard millions to crypto. At 24 hours after launch, TRUMP has nearly 600,000 holders. I expect that number to be 1 million in no time. For many of these holders, it will be the first crypto they buy. But it won’t be the last.
The TRUMP launch was actually really good. As far as I can tell, Moonshot and Meteora, the protocol providing liquidity for TRUMP, didn’t leak details of the launch. The supply is limited to 1 billion, with 80% of the supply locked. There's a 36-month vesting schedule, which is set to begin unlocking in three months, nearly coinciding with the end of Trump’s first 100 days in office, an important milestone in American politics.
And yet, one reason TRUMP mooned was because it was tightly controlled. We already know that 80% of the tokens are held by the team and locked, but other top wallets may be controlled by team members too. If you look at Bubblemaps, you can see the connected wallets both shortly after launch:
and 24 hours later:
Trump’s team is known to be crypto curious, experienced even, and this launch proves it. I think it’s totally reasonable to extrapolate that the promised executive orders around crypto within his first few days in office will not just be executed, but will also be well-thought-out.
Paul Atkins, nominated by Trump to lead the SEC, was an SEC Commissioner two decades ago, and in 2017 he joined the Token Alliance, a crypto advocacy group. He is likely to reverse Gensler’s war on crypto with haste. Bullish.
We’ve been calling for sensible crypto regs in the U.S. for a very long time now, but I actually think we’ll finally get them. The SEC and CFTC (which also has jurisdiction to regulate crypto assets) are enforcement agencies but they don’t make the rules, Congress does. Trump is coming into office with a Republican Congress, and numerous draft regulation bills that have been circulating in those hallowed halls for years. There are bills to regulate stablecoins and bills to provide structure for the crypto market, and there’s some speculation that these bills could be taken up ASAP. Who knows, maybe we get regulation before the end of his first 100 days in office; it seems certain that we will have them in 2025.
None of this even begins to mention the Bitcoin Strategic Reserve, let alone the crypto strategic reserve, which would hold other digital assets too. Suffice to say, if the U.S. actually passed crypto market regs AND started to HODL digital assets on its balance sheet, you would be a pessimist indeed not to believe that that’s just the start of larger sovereign nations (yes, I see you El Salvador) to also begin putting crypto on the books.
Can you even imagine how much more excited Trump is about crypto, now that he has launched what he’ll surely call “The Greatest Cryptocurrency In The History Of The World”? If he was ready to push crypto before, I can only assume that it’s all he can think about at the moment. This may be bad for world affairs, but it’s absolutely awesome for crypto. He’s not just a pro-crypto President, he’s a pro-crypto President who is now one of the most successful crypto entrepreneurs of all time.
OMG THIS IS ALL SO BULLISH!
Is This Really Bullish?
On the one hand, of course this is insanely bullish for crypto over a longer time frame. A crypto-friendly U.S. regime, pro-innovation, pro-crypto market regulation, onboarding the masses. Plenty will go wrong of course. The regulations could take too long or just be plain bad. The masses could (they will) get rekt by more sophisticated traders. Trump will get side-tracked with other matters, wars, borders, some new emergency.
But this is the inflection point we’ve been waiting for. Never have we had such a confluence of factors to begin laying the foundations for a long and prosperous future, for not just crypto in the U.S. but crypto everywhere. In the past, when the SEC sneezed, the cryptoverse became sick. But no longer. What happens when fear is removed and is replaced with encouragement from the U.S. political establishment and certainty from regulatory bodies?
Whatever the next 100 days bring, they are going to be some of the most exciting for crypto watchers. Will the follow up I write in 100 days be the bullish optimism I hope it will be, or will it be mired by recounting missed opportunities, broken promises, and the regular political gridlock? I have no real idea what to expect, no one does, but anything is better than what we’ve come to expect out of Washington. And in some ways there’s nothing more bullish than that.
Author Bio
Hiro Kennelly is a writer and cofounder of IndyPen CryptoMedia, buidler at Black Flag DAO, and governator at DAOplomats. He loves people, Moloch, and degenerative cryptoeconomics.
Editor and Designer Bio
trewkat is a writer, editor, and designer interested in the potential for web3 to disrupt fat cats. She is a long-time contributor at Black Flag DAO and cofounder of IndyPen CryptoMedia.
This post does not contain financial advice, only educational information. By reading this article, you agree and affirm the above, as well as that you are not being solicited to make a financial decision, and that you in no way are receiving any fiduciary projection, promise, or tacit inference of your ability to achieve financial gains.
IndyPen CryptoMedia is open to submissions for publication. We’d love to read your work, so please submit your article for consideration!
