A day before officially becoming the forty seventh President of the USA, Donald Trump is making waves within 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 because the TRUMP meme coin has sparked a substantial amount of dialogue and is currently facing a backlash for what critics said was a questionable enterprise for the incoming President.
Critics Condemn TRUMP Meme Coin Launch
While everyone seems to be 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 whether it is ethical for an American president to launch his meme coin.
Popular YouTuber Stephen Findeisen, also referred to as Coffeezilla, believes that the launching, which is simply days before Trump’s inauguration is off-timing, considering Trump might be appointing the brand new Chair of the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
> dropping TRUMP memecoin 2 days before becoming president is nasty work
> latest SEC/DOJ guarantees no prosecution
> 80% of tokens vest to insiders DURING the presidency
> most ppl losing money might be MAGA who aren’t crypto native
> *should* be against the law but crime is legal now ig?— Coffeezilla (@coffeebreak_YT) January 18, 2025
“Dropping TRUMP memecoin 2 days before becoming president is nasty work. Latest SEC/DOJ guarantees no prosecution,” Findeisen said in his X post.
Other critics questioned Trump’s latest enterprise which of their opinion somewhat blurred the boundaries of presidency and business.
Even Trump’s former aide, Anthony Scaramucci slammed the brand new meme coin describing it as a type 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 possibly be considered a profiteering effort.
In accordance with reports, about 80% of the tokens might be distributed to individuals inside the circle of the incoming president.
“It’s literally cashing in on the presidency — making a financial instrument so people can transfer money to the president’s family in connection together with his office. It’s beyond unprecedented,” Noti told the Latest York Times.
The brand new meme coin also doesn’t sit well with some personalities within the cryptocurrency industry seeing it as a unclean tactic.
“Trump owning 80 percent and timing launch hours before inauguration is predatory and plenty of will likely get hurt by it,” former Coinbase executive Nick Tomaino said in a post.
TRUMP Coin Soars
Analysts said that the brand new Trump-based token needed only quarter-hour to achieve a market capitalization of $400 million, saying the meme coin also pushed Solana’s native token SOL to an all-time high of $267.
Okay yeah the brand 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 brand new meme coin recorded over 12,000% adoption because 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 inside a number of hours.
Nevertheless, it is just too early to inform what the longer term of the token might be considering only 20% of the 1 billion TRUMP coins are in circulation. The remaining 80% of the tokens might be released in the subsequent three years.
Featured image from The Nation, chart from TradingView