Trump made himself a crypto billionaire over the weekend

Launched by Donald Trump on Friday, the memecoin soared to $74.59 on Sunday and settled at $52.71 today. This gave the new token a market capitalization of approximately $10.7 billion, making it the 18th largest cryptocurrency. 24-hour trading volume of $TRUMP reached $52.5 billion. Against this backdrop, Bitcoin reached an all-time high of $109,072 just hours before the US President-elect returned to the White House.

Image source: viralmag.fr

Two days before taking office, US President-elect Donald Trump published an “official meme” on social network X, a cryptocurrency dedicated to his election victory. Of the total supply of nearly 1 billion tokens, 80% are owned by CIC Digital LLC, which is an affiliate of The Trump Organization, and another Trump business called Fight LLC. Thus, at the time of writing this material, Trump’s fortune in his own memcoins is estimated at approximately $40 billion.

Image source: tradefactor.com

The $TRUMP token, issued on the Solana blockchain, has greatly enriched Trump personally, enabled the crypto industry to funnel money to him, and created a volatile financial asset that allows anyone in the world to financially speculate on Trump’s political fortunes. The coin’s official website, GetTrumpMemes.com, encourages visitors to purchase the coins with dollars or cryptocurrency to “celebrate our victory and have some fun!”

On Sunday, following the example of her husband, Melania Trump launched her own cryptocurrency on the Solana blockchain, which also quickly soared in price and reached $9.6 per coin, and its market capitalization exceeded $1.85 billion.

Image source: CoinMarketCap

About 200 million of the 1 billion coins have already been issued and are actively traded. The rest are owned by Trump-controlled entities and could be sold over the next three years, starting in April. According to the official website, the new cryptocurrency “is not intended to be […] an investment opportunity […] and has nothing to do with any political campaign or any political office.” This did not stop investors from making millions from it. On average, Trump’s companies will be able to sell about 24 million coins per month into the market, which at current prices (which continue to change) would amount to revenue of $1.73 billion per month or $20.7 billion per year.

Trump has vowed to become a “crypto president” and is expected to issue executive orders aimed at reducing barriers to cryptocurrency regulation and promoting widespread adoption of digital assets. The prospect of looser cryptocurrency regulations was greeted with enthusiasm by the industry and fueled a rally in Bitcoin following Trump’s election victory in November.

The Emoluments Clause of the US Constitution, written in 1787, hardly envisioned a world in which a president could create billions of dollars of personal wealth out of nothing. It is currently impossible to track who will be purchasing this coin over the next three years and thereby funneling their money directly to Trump. Given the Supreme Court’s broad view of presidential immunity, there is a good chance that any such action will be found lawful.

Trump just gave a master class in the president’s ability to turn power into wealth.