$TRUMP Just Changed the Face of Crypto Forever

This was definitely one of the craziest weekends I’ve ever experience in crypto. It's obviously still early days and a massive, evolving story. A lot can change in the coming days and weeks.

In case you missed it, here’s the TL;DR:

• Donald Trump, aka the President of the United States of America as of tomorrow, launched his own meme coin Friday evening.
• The announcement was made via his account on X.
• The token is formally called OFFICIAL TRUMP and has the ticker symbol $TRUMP.
• It ran to a $34 billion fully diluted market valuation in 14 hours, something a meme coin has never done before.
• As of Sunday 3 pm (CET), the token’s FDV is $70 billion. This makes it the biggest meme coin in the world, surpassing the reigning champion Dogecoin.
• Lastly, in case you were curious, I don't own any $TRUMP when this post goes live.

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The market impact

The good

The $TRUMP token itself was obviously the biggest winner of the weekend. Several traders made enough money to retire on that single trade.

The first downstream effect came from the Trump team’s choice of blockchain: Solana.

The demand for $SOL increased massively when investors needed it to buy $TRUMP, pushing up the price. Investors also seemed to take Trump's decision as legitimization of the Solana blockchain. $SOL was trading around $220 when $TRUMP was launched and ran to $290 at the pet before pulling back a bit as I'm writing this.

The broader Solana ecosystem got a boost as well. The tokens tied to the most popular decentralized exchanges, Jupiter and Raydium, gained 30% and 20% respectively.

The market impact wasn’t all positive though. In fact, most tokens took a big hit over the weekend.

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The bad

Bitcoin held steady and didn’t seem too impacted by the craziness.

Solana’s main direct competitor, Ethereum, moved opposite of Solana though. If the most powerful man in the world chooses Solana for his meme coin, where does that leave Ethereum? $ETH is down 5% since $TRUMP launched and was down almost 10% at the bottom on Sunday.

At the peak on Sunday, $SOL had gained 48% against $ETH!

Most other meme coins and the recently hot AI sector of the crypto market all got demolished in the process. The aforementioned $DOGE dropped 15% while other meme leaders like $PEPE, $MOG, and $WIF all fell 20 - 25% from $TRUMP launch to the Sunday morning bottom.

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What it means for crypto

What stood out to me over the weekend was that most people were more excited about the deeper impact on the industry than they were on the trade itself.

Sure, people who made the equivalent of a lifetime salary in a few hours shared their well-earned excitement around that. But for the most part, people highlighted the massive contrast with the previous administration’s outright war against the entire crypto space.

The Biden administration actively tried to kill crypto (or at least parts of it).

The Trump administration is fully embracing it.

More specifically, the SEC under Biden (under Gary Gensler’s leadership) has made it extremely unclear who is allowed to launch tokens and when. When is it a “security”? When will the SEC come after you for launching a silly token?

Well, Trump's direct involvement in crypto (through World Liberty Financial, his NFT collectibles, and now a meme coin), those concerns have pretty much evaporated.

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Key takeaways

Trump’s launch of $TRUMP was a monumental moment for the legitimization of crypto. It was likely the biggest moment for crypto since the approval of the Bitcoin ETFs about a year ago.

It opens the floodgate for a lot more innovation and token launches. And it undoubtedly brings a lot more people into crypto, supporters of Trump who didn’t know or care about meme coins before but want to support their president. As I’m writing this, the $TRUMP token already has 750,000 holders (which is also unheard of in such a short timespan). But why wouldn’t that number 10x from here?

What's more, Trump himself is now the biggest meme. In crypto and arguably in the world. He was already the first self-proclaimed crypto president and now has his face on one of the biggest tokens of them al. Like it or not, he's literally the face of crypto.