Julius OkorieDonald Trump’s soaring cryptocurrency meme coin suffered a drop on Sunday after his wife Melania Trump launched her own coin.
The former first lady announced her crypto token Sunday afternoon at 4:10pm ET on Truth Social and X, after which $TRUMP tanked roughly 41 per cent, according to price tracker CoinMarketCap.
Join our WhatsApp ChannelDespite that, Trump reposted both of Melania’s announcements on his social media pages.
$MELANIA is hosted on the Solana blockchain, just like $TRUMP, and can be bought for about $0.09. Her token is much smaller than her husband’s, having a market cap of nearly $4.5 million to Trump’s $8.5 billion.
Shortly after the soon-to-be president announced his meme coin on Friday via Truth Social, his supporters pushed it up to a market cap of $13.3 billion.
READ ALSO:Everything You Need To Know About $TRUMP Meme Coin
The reaction most people had to Melania’s meme launch was one of complete shock.
‘This is beyond insane,’ analysts at The Kobeissi Letter posted to X. ‘Less than 48 hours ago, Donald Trump launched $trump which just erased $7.5 billion in market cap in 10 minutes. In the minutes around the launch of Melania Trump’s token, we saw massive sell orders in $trump.’
‘Looks like crypto is becoming a family business,’ prolific X influencer Mario Nawfal posted.
Meme coins are generally considered to be incredibly risky investments, since they are prone to insider-trading and extreme volatility.
According to Melania’s meme website, 35 per cent of the tokens have been distributed to team vesting, 20 percent have gone to both the team’s treasury and community, and 10 percent has gone to liquidity.
Just 15 per cent of the tokens are available to purchase for the general public, according to the website.
Trump’s meme coin announcement featured an artist rendering of the coin showing Trump pumping his right fist in the air with the slogan, ‘Fight, Fight, Fight.’
Both Melania and Trump’s coins are fungible tokens, meaning that each token is identical and interchangeable with one another. Government-issued currencies like US dollars are considered fungible as well.
Trump has also sold non-fungible tokens in the past, better known as NFTs. They were billed as digital trading cards that featured him in various heroic settings.
The joint announcements came as Trump is set to be inaugurated as the next president on Monday after defeating Vice President Kamala Harris in the November election.
Trump has already announced he’ll be signing a flurry of executive orders on day one of his second presidency, the most anticipated being his decree to save TikTok after it was briefly banned in the US on Saturday.
Julius Okorie is Chief Sports and Entertainment Correspondent for Prime Business Africa. He began his journalism career with the Champion Newspaper and Sporting Champion and later moved on to Daily Independent and the Nation Newspapers. Okorie joined Prime Business Africa in 2024 bringing on board 20 years of experience in writing investigative news on Sports and Entertainment. His well researched and highly informative articles on Sports Business and general entertainment are followed by a wide range of audience.
