Trump launches meme coin, apparently makes more than $25 billion overnight
President-elect Trump launched his own cryptocurrency overnight and swiftly appeared to make more than $25 billion on paper for himself and his companies.
Why it matters: The stunning launch of $TRUMP caught the entire industry off-guard, and speaks to both his personal influence and the ascendancy of cryptocurrency in his administration.
- It also speaks to the nature of the crypto industry that someone could have $25 billion worth of something that literally did not exist 24 hours previously.
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I suppose that's more streamlined method of bribery than buying property in his towers or booking his hotels.
Or buying ads on his wife's radio station as apparently was how you'd get in front of President Johnson.
Hmmm that's interesting. I wish I knew more about the crimes of all the presidents. I feel like if they were talked about more it would really bring down some of the power that people want to give to that office. Instead they make them out to be like gods after they are dead long enough
It's funny (sad funny not hot haha funny) because we had a whole ass apology tour to the rest of the world because of getting caught having the Bush administration sign off on torture, up to and including lawyers and psychologists to support the theory that it was just "enhanced interrogation."
Those are war crimes my dude. Bush should have been sent to the Hague. Honestly, what Bush, Cheney and Co. did was so much worse, devastating to the world, violent, and murderous than anything Trump has done yet. Honestly, you could argue that they ruined US reputation so bad internally and externally that they set the stage for Trump to take over. Trump won the year Jeb Bush was supposed to be coronated just like Hillary Clinton. They also are part of the current crises with immigration and rising right-wing sentiment in Europe since the war displaced so many. Bush deeply fucked up the planet and Europe and the Middle East especially.
In fact, Trump will do one thing previous Presidents haven't done, he will make his own citizens suffer most of the pain instead of foreigners. That's evidenced by how he considers many citizens to be foreigners already due to things like birthright citizenship. They've come out and said that explicitly. I guarantee he will be the first US President to cause more suffering to his own citizens than foreign citizens. He literally is gleeful at things like the Death Penalty, he wants to be the one pulling the switch. He's really not all that different from Matt Berry's character on Snuff Box who is a royal executioner who loves his job.
Anyway, we never did anything about actual well documented capital-W War Crimes, and instead have a "Hague Invasion Act" so if anyone from the US gets dragged to the Hague we'll invade it to get them back. Like holy shit, I had my "Are we the baddies?" moment 24 fucking years ago.
It's not beyond the realm of possibility that he could accidentally start a war somewhere in the world. Or make an existing one much worse than it already is.
100% this. 25 billions? That's quite some money but nothing regarding the sell out that will happen the next 4 years. The USA will be slaughtered on a global scale, strictly orchestrated by its own rules of unrestricted capitalism. The last feast before the climate wars.
Trump holds 80% of the supply. This is going to be the biggest rug pull of all time. Americans are literally getting shitcoin scammed by their own presidents holy shit what a timeline.
Honestly, it's kinda impressive that this scheme still works in 2025. How low can people go, I wonder.
Just means more rugs need to be pulled until idiots have no more money to waste.
Fresh idiots are being born every day, unfortunately
Calls on rugs!
And these "coins" are actually tokens. Not only are they not backed by any real assets (venture capital, real estate, etc), the damn things don't even exist in reality!
It's somehow even worse than NFTs
Honestly, I won't forgive Biden for just smiling in response to Trump winning after not leaving 4 years sooner. Before anyone asks, I voted for Harris, so don't shove that narrative down my throat.
The tankies are getting REAL close to just outright admitting they wanted Trump, so there's that.
The defo do. Trump wants to hand Ukraine to Putin on a silver platter, the tankies have been salivating for that for years now
Best trash takes itself out is how I see it. Glad they make it so easy to spot with red merch.
can I short this?
Not that I'm aware of.
You used yo be able to do it on sketchy unregulated Chineseesque trading sites. Been a while since I used one and they go down semi regularly.
You can short anything if you find a lender
There are plenty of Americans that will buy this coin and lose money.
I'm sure there's still a plenty of idiots buying these.
Yes, to the tune of 10s or maybe a couple 100s of millions of dollars. But now Saudi Arabia can come in and buy a billion worth of the coin as a direct donation to trump with zero oversight. This is open corruption on a scale we simply haven't seen before.
Of all the things crypto would bring us, I would never have imagined it would create transparency and democratization in corruption. What a time to be alive!
No doubt. Just saying it's gonna be a rag pull towards the idiots in addition to all the corruption.
Trump bout to Hawk Tuah! on the American people and maybe the world.
They aren't buying cryptocurrency - they're buying influence. The cryptocurrency is just a front.
The grift is so transparent it's scary that so many people can't/won't see it.
Please someone explain how this is in any way legal. This is fucking absurd. The amount of hatred I have for every racist imbecile that supported this rapist fascist felon is too much for me to bear. The logical thing to do would be to just ignore everything because my mental well-being is more important, but this seems like some historic occurrence that should be stopped by any means necessary.
There's no rule saying a dog can't play basketball
Do not bring air bud into this
There's a movie about it though
Why should legality matter? What are laws? It's rules that the government put down for everyone to follow. And what happens if someone controls all aspects of the government?
Legality is meaningless in the face of fascism, because the fascist government will be making the laws. it's like asking why it wasn't illegal to do genocide in nazi Germany. Or asking why it wasn't enforced by law to hide jews from the nazis to protect them
Legality is not relevant. Legality is not morality or a foundation for ethics. Legality is just the will of the government, for better or for worse. It is not something that necessarily serves the people's beat interests
At this point, anything the billionaires want is legal. It is fucking absurd. The entirety of T****'s first term was insanity. This one will be catastrophic, and unfixable for generations. His supreme court, judges, corruption has made it inevitable.
I tried to logically deal with the firehose of lies and hatred, thought it was important and worth it. Not anymore. Not again. This country is too fucking dumb for me to care anymore, too easily manipulated. Not worth the pain. I did what I could, voted against it every time. "But the price of eggs!"
I'm just going to fuck off and try to enjoy myself while it burns. Someone wake me for the revolution, the oligarch bbq, or some legit riots at least.
I for one, hope to see the guillotine make a surprise return. It worked for the French.
RepugnantcansThe party of misanthropic fascist vermin cheated the system to stack the highest court in the land with loyalists who now nearly unconditionally support anything Trump says/wants. It's legal because they literally put in writing that any/everything he does is.Edit: you right
Repugnantcans is trying wayyyyy too hard.
Republicunts?
I mean nothing stops you from creating a new cryptocurrency, so it was kinda inevitable.
Crypto is legally a type of stock in the usa. So has long as trum doesn't do anything that would get him on the hook for stock or security fraud he is in the clear
Crypto market cap does not equate the equivalent in dollars. When you create a new cryptocoin you can freely adjust the coin's parameters such as the amount of available coins. So let's say you "print" 1000 coins and sell one at $50. You now have a market cap of $50000.
It's like pulling a rabbit out of a hat, with the notable distinction that the rabbit isn't real. What makes it real is if enough suckers actually buy the coins with real dollars.
I wish more people understood this. Especially in the press, since its their job to educate everyone else.
Trading volume is what matters, not trading price. It's only worth $25 billion if you can turn $25 billion of it into cash.
Unfortunately since banks still haven't take wised up to this, and the wildcat crypto banks really haven't, its likely still possible to pump a meme coin and then take out loans against the purported asset value. The bank is then left trying to repossess a pile of worthless memecoin when you fail to repay the loan.
I'd like to add that trade volume is only a slightly better indicator, because wash trading is very easy in crypto. Wash trading happens when the coin's owner and/or an accomplice buy and sell coins back and forth among themselves. It's easy to do if you have control over a huge amount of coins, because you printed them yourself at the low low price of $0. This has two effects: the trade volume grows, which makes it look like there is public interest in the coin, and you can pump up the price at the same time.
Very true.
I suppose I should have said "Fiat dollar trading volumes" although that's an oversimplification. The question you're really trying to answer is "How much actual demand is there for this invented commodity?"
The answer is, inevitably, not nearly enough. When 80% of the available supply of something is locked up in a vault somewhere, there's absolutely no way that 80% could be liquidated without crashing whatever market exists.
In other words, in about a week we'll want to start shorting this asset. Trump will have absolutely no hesitation to hyperinflate it just printing more trump coins. This man doesn't do subtle or half measures, he goes big, and this is going to fail in a big way.
Thats not a problem with cryptocurrency in general. Its only an issue with the subset of coins that premine, which is a scam.
This is so fucking stupid. Everything. I feel like we're living in a fucking clown show.
The amazing real circus
Can't decide if I'm annoyed that this poorly-disguised influence scheme will go unpunished, or if thrilled that many very deserving people will be separated from their money.
Why would you be happy about their money going to even less deserving people?...
if you felicificly calculate it it works out
Think of it this way I can't bribe Trump but if I bought 20% of this shitcoin I might be able to get his ear.
Ftfy
Bingo, the CCP can't bribe Trump directly but they can buy a ton of crypto.
If you previously weren't convinced crypto is a scammers paradise, this should convince you.
EDIT: removed not nice comment.
Meme coins are a scam, yes. Coins with ETFs are legit. Buy BTC and stake ETH; ignore the rest.
We literally have (what I think is) a scam instance with a bunch of accounts made in the same day that's been online in the fedi for about 20 days now @realbitcoin.cash. Why is there a fedi instance seemingly making fake accounts to pump bitcoincash? Doesn't Bitcoincash have an ETF?
Why were all the accounts made on the same day if this is organic and not an admin making a bunch of accounts?
Sorry man, this kind of stuff doesn't pass my personal sniff test (you do you), and the fact that it's already here doesn't make me go "gosh this isn't a scam at all."
Staking is a system where rich people get money for owning money. Sounds like a scam
Trump previously sold Trump-branded steak. Is steak a "scammer's paradise"?
Steak has a legitimate use.
Yeah, for cooking into shoe leather and slathering in catsup before spending the next few hours on the shitter tweeting nonsense words until you manage a single bunny style bowel movement.
So do cryptocurrencies. Maybe not for you, personally, but other people have legitimate uses for them.
Such as grifting idiots with promises of fortune and glory.
You think that's a legitimate use? That's exactly what Trump is using it for here.
Ooof buddy. Ooof.
Name one (1) legitimate use case that is not better served in another way
Private online (or maybe even offline) payments with Monero. And even if it's not monero, you don't have to deal with the BS of banks, such as the transactions taking days to complete. And nothing is tied to your real identity, making you entirely anonymous.
The reason that bank transactions take days to finalize is because of regulatory compliance. The actual money can be moved in seconds.
I don't know if you can reasonably cite "bypassing regulatory compliance" as a "legitimate" use case for something.
Anonymous online payment is cool and all right up until you fill out your address so they can bring whatever you paid for to your house.
That's fair, but I was talking about online payments for digital goods, such as VPSes, vpns, donations, etc.
Also, let's say irl stores adopted cryptocurrency as a payment method. Your bank wouldn't know what you're buying and therefore wouldn't be able to sell that information.
You're going to use that "is not better served in another way" clause to wiggle out of anything I might suggest, but okay.
The Ethereum Name System is a permissionless and fully decentralized version of the Domain Name System. Lacking central servers and control means it can't suffer outages like DNS does.
Oh nice no more regular outages like checks notes visa that one time 7 years ago for 40 minutes
Sounds like an overly complicated and resource intensive way to have failover servers to me, and I'm usually pro-decentralization.
I don't experience DNS interruptions when I'm running multiple failovers.
As predicted.
Bitcoin is the most secure banking method.
Though blockchain tech produces new problems that ultimately make it useless outside of a store of value.
I don't know what you said, but I support it.
Same. I stand with [removed by moderator]
Only if you pre-define all possible recipients of untraceable money to be criminals.
How about donating to Tibetan or Uyghur activists in China? Womens' rights activists in Saudi Arabia? LGBTQ+ organizations in Russia? What about Cannabis dispensaries in American states where Cannabis is legal but the Federal government is still trying to prosecute them? Or sending money back to your family in Venezuela?
This is a great example of the ridiculous polarization that current American politics are suffering from. I loathe Trump. He's the worst president America has ever had, and it's utterly baffling that he got reelected. But since he used cryptocurrency for something and I'm not anti-crypto, boom, I'm assumed to be an extreme Trump supporter.
Also, rule 1 of this community: be civil.
I literally just listed a variety of situations where you'd need to do that.
Laundering money and buying drugs.
Got any more straw for that man?
It’s more that your argument is logically flawed and the person responding is pointing that out.
For what it’s worth I do think crypto is scammer’s paradise, but your original comment does not provide any real justification for that except a single example. Nor is saying “jump of a bridge” really polite.
It didn't exist 24 hours ago and is now valued at $24 billion and doesn't actually do anything except "hold value." You can't live inside of it like a house, you can't eat it, you can't drink it. Why is it worth $24 billion other than "it's a scam?"
I don't really need a serious fucking argument because that alone should be enough.
Also, Carter had to sell his fucking peanut farm, but this is fine, I guess. Nothing to see here, move along. I just need better arguments, it's not that this is open and shut corruption out in the open.
You've lost track of what's being talked about. I was talking about steak.
I'm not saying Trump's cryptocurrency isn't a scam. It almost certainly is a scam. But you generalized from that to saying that "crypto is a scammer's paradise" and then told people who didn't agree with you to kill themselves. That's where your logic is flawed (and also where it's certainly a violation of this community's "be civil" rule).
The fact that Trump has released a scam cryptocurrency doesn't mean that all crypto is a scam, in the same way that Trump releasing an awful Trump-branded steak doesn't make all steaks into some kind of weird grift.
Yeah, because you can still eat a steak dude. Even if it's a shitty low-quality one.
I wasn't aware of the "can I eat it?" Method of determining whether something is a scam or not.
sharper image + trump = double the scam at 5x the price. didn't even pair it with diaperking's favorite ketchup
Pump and dump
My dyslexia initially read that as "plump and dumb" which is also accurate.
This is going to be a historic pump and dump.
Holy fuck, the grift is so blatant that I'm almost beginning to respect it.
I'm sure that's the first payment of the bribes from Russia and Saudis. Untraceable and the plausible irrationality of buying memecoins deflects questions.
First?
Yeah. It's been mentioned that a memecoin has value only if it's for bribe payment.
Don't forget scams
What a world we live in
The fact that fartcoins are 30 times as "valuable" as Trumps idiot-coins should be evidence enough.
Isnt this showing the exact opposite? Fart coin is less valuable?
To be fair the valuability of a coin is not that much related to its popularity, but to its difficulty of obtention through proof-of-work (of proof of stake)
It's like auctioning away the presidency
And still doesn’t exist. It’s not a tangible thing.
This comment isn't a tangible thing but it exists.
"Apparently" and "on paper" doing a lot of work there. Is it actually trading at that value?
I think they're basing it on current trading price and the fact that Trump inc owns 80% of the tokens.
I hope everyone is acutely aware that you, me, WE are not in a class war.
WE HAVE LOST A CLASS WAR.
What happens now?
Now we wait til it gets so bad people stop going to work, in unity.
Time to start the next one
Isn’t that a conflict of interest?
His whole political career has been a conflict of interest.
Who's going to stop him?
It's not a crime if it's the president, the scrotus said so
Anything from Coffeezilla yet?
Edit: Yes
Hey guys! Sorry to interrupt you, Nick. Hello. Anywho! It's getting kinda late, so I'm gonna go to bed. I'll talk to you all tomorrow.
Meanwhile, back in reality:
The venture was co-ordinated by CIC Digital LLC - an affiliate of the Trump Organization - which has previously sold Trump-branded shoes and fragrances.
Meme coins are used to build popularity for a viral internet trend or movement, but they lack intrinsic value and are extremely volatile investments.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9vmym2jvy9o.amp
Just because you SAY something is "worth hundreds of billions" does not mean it is actually WORTH hundreds of billions.
To be fair, "market cap" is also a bullshit metric for stocks. The market price only ever represents the price of the currently traded stocks. Just dump 20% of the stock of any large company on the market and see how well their "market cap" lasts.
America for sale. You hear that Republicans? You just got sold out.
I doubt they can hear much of anything with their heads lodged that far up Trump's ascending colon.
Really sucks that I, an atheist, acknowledge that I can do nothing more impactful than pray Trump dies soon.
Luigi disagrees.
Thomas Crooks tried and fucking failed 🤦♂️
Also, it's a bummer that there's no eternal punishment waiting for him.
Holy shit, inb4 he pumps and dumps and avoids jail cause of presidential immunity
Is that even illegal yet?
Nothing is illegal for a POTUS. He cannot be charged with any crime while in office, running for office, considering to run for office, and/or dreaming of being in office.
I'd love to be POTUS. Time to download some Nintendo games! /j
Pump and dump schemes? Yes, according to earlier incarcerations
For stocks, yes, but crypto is basically unregulated as far as I know.
And trump intends to keep it unregulated because of course he's seen the quick buck he can make with that scam
Old Man stock market looks up and chuckles "That's my boy...line go up."
It's easy to think that crypto is over. The NFT bubble is so deflated. We've seen big companies like FTX bomb the hell out. I mean, the signs are obvious now, aren't they? Crypto was, conclusively, proven to be the scam everyone said it would be and we don't need any more proof, right?
And then we hear Trump administration is really into this crypto nonsense.
Somehow.
Guess they didn't get the memo.
Brace yourself for 4 years of spectacular, glorious fail.
And if someone says stuff like "oh, Trump just got filthy rich off of the meme coin he launched yesterday", let's wait and see how the coin does at the end of his administration.
Or in 6 months
Even worse, they are used for lot of criminal cases, like human trafficking, childporn, drugs, weapons and more.
Like 95% money laundering, drugs and tax avoidance scams, like 5% everything else.
In my mind this is just another way for shady actors to give him money with less paper trail. Is that not possible? I admit I don't actually know how people are buying or selling this.
Honestly if that's what's happening it seems like an actual 'good' use case for crypto. Good as in clever/useful not good as in, well, good.
Pfft, I'm betting he'll rugpull in a month, tops, possibly before february even starts.
He might rename USA to Trumpistan 🤣
All the wrong people got money.
QE was a method of upward distribution of wealth.
What is QE?
Quantative Easing
Fools always find their kind
They are only worth what
peopleidiots pay for it.It’s money laundering
Sucker born every minute, etc.
$25 billion, in paper. The value will be down to zero way before he manages to sell off even $1 billion from it. And thats a generous guess. Meme coins don't retain value.
Making ANY money this way is outrageous, but we sooner solve world peace and world hunger than Trump being able to sell this off for the current paper value.
Yeah I feel as though he won't get that amount of money either and making any money is also outrageous.
I feel like the biggest pressing issue here is that this is not meant to go to the moon and stay there. Instead I think the real motive is to make inflation. Look at it, it's not meant to gain that amount of value, it's meant to skew our perception of value. This way the current inflationary prices don't look out of place when, in reality, everything is over valued. I guess it is also meant to make some people more complacent to inflation by giving them hope of "there being a chance" even though it clearly details how screwed over most of them will end up in the end compared to the house/dealer. Gambling is and will always be a big problem that adds more pressure to an otherwise unhealthy economy.
I don't deny the possibility, but that sounds like a lot of foresight which I'm not ready to attribute to Trump or his team. Additionally I don't think they care about "the people". The voters served their purpose. They are meaningless to them now. They will continue to produce anger and outrage, and will extract as much money as possible while it's still possible.
I think it's a simple money grab. Just not a $25 billion one.
While I agree with the sentiment here, the market cap of the coin is currently at 7.6B according to https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/official-trump/
Anyone know why there's such a big discrepancy here? Maybe I'm misread?
Circulating vs total supply?
That's how they got the number but it's a big mistake to use total supply. Also it's not because the market cap is 12G that Trump received 12G. It's probably much much lower. He must have made only 50 to 100M in fees, if any. And the price he sold the coins at was much much lower than today
That name is perfect. Gonna start calling it strumpet.
So... he stole the idea from hawk tuah
Was that premined?
Pump&Dump^TM^
~~Pump&~~Dump^Trump
Did Brady read the article?
We should have seen that coming.
There is a lot more of this coming.
Trump intends to leverage his office to make his family wealthier.
lol crypto is worth jack shit. I can just keep sending the same money to myself and it would cause the price to go up...
This isn't your everyday crypto scheme.
This is foreign bribes being laundered.
This right here is the right answer. Trump just created the ultimate bribing machine for himself.
That's not how markets work...
I just finished watching Chernobyl and comments like this are now going to remind me of the fact that the reactor could not have exploded because that's not how RBMK reactors work.
Huh? Not sure how crypto-markets and reactors are related to each other...
Former is "just" based demand and supply, which of course can still be quite chaotic, because well demand and supply is chaotic (due to all kinds of factors)...
it's how crypto markets do. Since anonymity is a feature, any transactions will increase its value due to it being "used" more
No, because that would be an infinite money glitch, everyone would be rich... (that uses crypto).
It's actually very simple basic market-economics, and independently of anonymity, you buy, you'll drive the price up, you'll sell, you'll drive the price down. It's slightly more complicated, because it involves makers (they set the price at which to sell or buy) and takers (which take the offer by the maker) and psychology (e.g. promotion on youtube to drive the price up) and obviously increasingly algorithms. But in general it's still demand and supply, anonymity doesn't have anything to do here apart from being more prone to scams. Take Monero as example one of the most anonym cryptos but still fairly stable (in crypto terms).
So to drive the price up, you either have to have some kind of good promotion (which at the end is just money from someone else), or a lot of money yourself.
the value of a cryptocurrency is based on its perceived value. Perceived value is based on market activity. If I keep sending money to myself it just shows up as market activity, with nobody being able to tell i sent money to myself.
gdp works this way too btw. I sell you $1 worth of stuff, you sell me $1 of stuff, nobody is any richer but gdp went up by $2. Except we can filter this kind of abuse out because it's not anonymous.
But GDP is not the price of an asset, it's a metric to measure the economic activity.
Is it really that hard to understand? The price is dictated by markets... Like with stock and other speculative assets. It's a little bit wilder, possibly due to anonymity and wild promotion on various platforms (like youtube) etc. But in it's essence it's still a market...
the price of an asset (when the asset is the currency itself) is based on its economic activity. You said so yourself. The price is dictated by markets. By how much is bought and sold on markets. That is the definition of economic activity. Which part of that do you not understand?
Well you brought GDP as argument, which just doesn't have anything to do with the price of an asset. If you sell a lot and buy a lot GDP grows, but the price of that asset can still be the same at the end.
Getting back to your initial argument:
This is just plain wrong, as I could just make myself rich according to that logic... I still need to have that FIAT-money, need to exchange it (in which case I have driven the price up), but now I have less FIAT, so either I have more FIAT to further drive the price, or well I need to cash out in which case I'll drive the price down. If I just send crypto from one (anonymous) account to another it just does... nothing to the price...
Fuck, I just looked at this yesterday and thought why not put a few monies in. And then went to sleep without doing anything.
Not doing something to help Trump just to enrich yourself is the ethical option.
There's that, but then again if I would have had managed to exit before the crash (which apparently already somewhat happened) I would've been practically stealing money from some MAGAs. But probably only those MAGAs who least deserve to be stolen from. The actual demons know exactly when to exit and are only going to profit from this.
You still would have helped Trump make money.
Having an ETF doesn't make you real. Being Bitcoin makes you real.
I wish there was a better metric at the moment, but there isn't.
Crypto is not capital. Crypto is a poker table, where each player can only cash out what somebody else brought to the table. Buying those coins is placing a bet, not making an investment. No value is created in or by the system.
If Trump wants to buy a hamberder with his 25 billion in monopoly money he needs to find a sucker to buy the monopoly money from him at the asking price. If that sucker want to buy a Banana with it, they need to find the next sucker. It's a pyramid game, and the farther you get from the top the more likely you'll end up the one without a next sucker below you.
The reason libertarians and similar nutjobs clamor for governments going into crypto is that those governments with their virtually bottomless pockets would then become the ultimate suckers. They'd be boosting the prices for all former holders of that coin, who could then cash out big by selling to the governments. Something they currently can't do in big volumes without tanking prices.
Unless the purpose of this venture is to get around laws that prevent bribes.