A day before officially becoming the 47th President of the United States, Donald Trump is making waves in the cryptocurrency landscape – not for his upcoming inauguration on January 20 – but for launching a controversial meme coin he named after himself.
Launched on January 17, the crypto token dubbed as the TRUMP meme coin has sparked a considerable amount of discussion and is currently facing a backlash for what critics said was a questionable venture for the incoming President.
Critics Condemn TRUMP Meme Coin Launch
While everyone is anticipating Trump’s incoming takeover of the White House, the US President-elect surprised the cryptocurrency community by launching his own meme coin on the Solana blockchain. This move has now sparked a firestorm of criticism which questioned if it is ethical for an American president to launch his meme coin.
Popular YouTuber Stephen Findeisen, also known as Coffeezilla, believes that the launching, which is only days before Trump’s inauguration is off-timing, considering Trump will be appointing the new Chair of the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
> dropping TRUMP memecoin 2 days before becoming president is nasty work
> new SEC/DOJ guarantees no prosecution
> 80% of tokens vest to insiders DURING the presidency
> most ppl losing money will be MAGA who aren’t crypto native
> *should* be a crime but crime is legal now ig?— Coffeezilla (@coffeebreak_YT) January 18, 2025
“Dropping TRUMP memecoin 2 days before becoming president is nasty work. New SEC/DOJ guarantees no prosecution,” Findeisen said in his X post.
Other critics questioned Trump’s new venture which in their opinion somewhat blurred the boundaries of government and business.
Even Trump’s former aide, Anthony Scaramucci slammed the new meme coin describing it as a form of “corruption”, arguing that the Trump token could adversely affect the broader digital asset market.
The Trump meme coin stuff is bad for the industry. Don’t delude yourself. It’s Idi Amin level corruption.
— Anthony Scaramucci (@Scaramucci) January 18, 2025
Profiteering Move?
Campaign Legal Center executive director Adav Noti accused Trump of using the presidency for his personal gain, saying the TRUMP meme coin could be considered a profiteering effort.
According to reports, about 80% of the tokens will be distributed to individuals within the circle of the incoming president.
“It is literally cashing in on the presidency — creating a financial instrument so people can transfer money to the president’s family in connection with his office. It is beyond unprecedented,” Noti told the New York Times.
The new meme coin also does not sit well with some personalities in the cryptocurrency industry seeing it as a dirty tactic.
“Trump owning 80 percent and timing launch hours before inauguration is predatory and many will likely get hurt by it,” former Coinbase executive Nick Tomaino said in a post.
TRUMP Coin Soars
Analysts said that the new Trump-based token needed only 15 minutes to reach a market capitalization of $400 million, saying the meme coin also pushed Solana’s native token SOL to an all-time high of $267.
Ok yeah the new Trump memecoin website is deployed almost identically to his previous NFT website.
Same cloudflare setup, same deployment with Heroku, same SSL certificate issuer.
Very similar HTML structure as before. pic.twitter.com/u1zLD7Vcv7
— cygaar (@0xCygaar) January 18, 2025
Despite the backlash, data also showed that the new meme coin recorded over 12,000% adoption since it was launched.
Market observers said that the coin’s value almost hit $35 before settling at about $29, adding that several crypto traders recorded gains with one investor reportedly making $50,000 to $1.1 million within a few hours.
However, it is too early to tell what the future of the token will be considering only 20% of the 1 billion TRUMP coins are in circulation. The remaining 80% of the tokens will be released in the next three years.
Featured image from The Nation, chart from TradingView
