The frenzy surrounding Donald Trump’s launch of his meme coin saw twists and turns over the weekend following the launch of a coin celebrating his wife Melania.
The price of the Trump Coin TRUMPUSD peaked at over $75 before plunging to the vicinity of $40 after the Melania Coin was announced on the former and incoming first lady’s social-media account. Trump Coin then recovered to $63 before again falling to below $55. It had fallen further, to just over $44 , by the time Trump was sworn in as president at the U.S. Capitol.
Neither the Trump Coin nor the Melania Coin has any underlying value.
A website for the Melania Coin characterizes the cryptocurrency bearing her name as “not financial instruments or investments” and says that they are for “collecting and entertainment purposes only.”
Trump Coin’s valuation per available supply was $11 billion — ranking as one of the top 20, according to CoinMarketCap — and Melania Coin’s was $2 billion. More of the coin supply will vest over time — Melania’s in as little as a month, and the president-elect’s in as little as three months.
Context: Trump launches surprise meme coin just before inauguration, and its price soars
It appears the launch of the Melania Coin was hastily arranged after the Trump Coin’s meteoric rise.
Expect more family members to get in on the act.
The Trump family’s World Liberty crypto project has just purchased domain names with the “.eth” suffix — domain-name extensions used for Ethereum sites — for Eric Trump and Barron Trump.
Some observers felt the Trump Coin’s launch could spell darker times for the broader cryptocurrency industry.
“Bitcoin, which started with some merits, gave birth to the whole cryptocurrency industry, which is quickly morphing into something that’s going to spiral out of control,” said Wilson Wang, founder of the blog HFI Research.
Harris “Kuppy” Kupperman, the chief investment officer of Praetorian Capital, said the coin launches may be the catalyst for the bursting of what he called a crypto bubble.
For now, however, the crypto industry’s doing just fine. Bitcoin BTCUSD was trading at over $108,000 on Inauguration Day, near a record high.
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