TRUMP and MELANIA crypto memecoins launch ahead of inauguration, chaos ensues

Cryptocurrency markets can be chaotic, but Trump (or teams connected to him) just took it to the next level.

Days ahead of Trump's inauguration as President of the United States, scheduled for Monday, Jan. 20, Trump launched the $TRUMP memecoin on crypto platform Solana. The President-elect posted the news from his official X account, making it as official as can be.

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This is not exactly news. Trump has endorsed cryptocoins and crypto projects before, though this one is now billed as the "only Official Trump Meme." The difference, however, is that this new memecoin – which, by the way, doesn't do anything, it's just a coin named TRUMP – was launched just ahead Trump's inauguration, making it easy to interpret it as a sort of an endorsement of the Solana platform, memecoins in general, and the practice of unscrupulously capitalizing on attention by launching a quick pump-and-dump scheme.

For an idea of how these things typically go, check the recent HAWK coin fiasco. As for the TRUMP coin, it quickly rose from basically zero to an astonishing $83, which multiplied by the number of coins (one billion) meant $TRUMP at one point had a fully diluted valuation (FDV) of $83 billion.

The enormous race to get into the $TRUMP coin caused an unprecedented liquidity drain on the rest of the market, with nearly all other cryptocurrency coins being sold off and losing value. As of this writing, $TRUMP sits at roughly $58, giving it a FDV of $58 billion. Some of the other crypto coins recovered in the meantime, with Bitcoin actually reaching an all-time-high price of $109,000 early on Monday, though numerous altcoins are still deeply in the red.

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This, however, apparently wasn't chaotic enough for Trump and his crypto army, who followed up by launching an official $MELANIA memecoin during Trump's victory rally on Sunday.

The launch resulted in yet another race to buy the coin, draining the liquidity from nearly everything on the market, including $TRUMP. So far, though, $MELANIA is doing well, with a price of $11.26, and a fully diluted valuation of $11.5 billion.

Cryptocurrencies are known to be volatile, and coins often rise from basically nothing to millions or even hundreds of millions of dollars in valuation within days, but the meteoric rise of $TRUMP was nuts even by those standards. With inauguration ahead of us, things are probably about to get even crazier.