The introduction of the new meme tokens from the Trump family caused the cryptocurrency market to sink heavily on Monday. As predicted, the new meme tokens Trump released, Melania Meme (MELANIA), sunk over 60% immediately after the inauguration of Donald Trump and currently sits at a market capital of $625.5 million.
Unlike MELANIA TRUMP, the coin Official Trump (TRUMP) plummeted from its weekly high of $73.74 to $45. This is a steep 43% decline. So far as its Solana backed token was concerned, it is now trading way below its initial price of 12,000% and is currently at a measly price of $4.18. Positioned as a meme entertainment token, its creators explicitly stated that it is not investment oriented.
But with the current scenario, where 35% of it’s assets are held with the creators for treasuring community speculations, the holders have serious concerns about the steep withdrawal.
With time, TRUMP started steady, but it’s value recently dipped meaningfully. After flow of funds through TRUMP was directed to MELANIA, it only worsened the plummet of its value.
The price flip flop was further exasperated with the problem of Solana infrastructure that came as high transaction volumes during trading Robo ATM and XYZ Exchange.
Dan Hughes, Founder and CTO of Radix, states that the launch of TRUMP being the world’s first Meme coin associated with a sitting president, was historical.
He added that the later MELANIA launch, alongside news regarding team wallets changing their TRUMP holdings into Solana (SOL) and Ethereum (ETH) exemplified market manipulation.
“This trend of celebrity-driven token launches, especially from political figures, creates a potential for undue influence and liquidity capture to overshadow value creation,” Hughes noted.
Despite all this, World Liberty Financial (WLF) which is a DeFi platform affiliated with the Trump family, has added close to 439 Wrapped Bitcoin (wBTC), approximately $47 million, in additional investments raising their total to 456.77 wBTC. The platform traded close to $100 million in BTC and ETH over the period of 2 days.
Sudhakar Lakshmanaraja, Founder of Digital South Trust, said the collapse of the Trump and Melania tokens demonstrate the danger of unregulated hype in the cryptocurrency space.
‘Meme coins are entirely speculative assets, where the sentiment of the market is the only driver, and so without real utility or use case, they are rendered useless’, he stated.
The market collapse happened around Trump’s second term inauguration when friendly policies towards crypto were expected but did not come through.
Both his speech and primary executive orders lacked any mention of digital assets, to the detriment of those who wished for much needed regulatory precision or some alterations in SEC policy such as SAB 121.
