When Donald Trump launched his own meme coin on Friday, a lot of people made a lot of money very quickly—but there’s at least one trader who bet, and won, a substantial amount of money much more quickly than most.
On Friday, four hours before Trump made the shocking announcement that he had launched TRUMP, his own Solana meme coin, an anonymous user filled a brand-spanking-new crypto wallet (identified as “6QSc2”) with over $1 million dollars worth of SOL, and then sat waiting.
Within thirty seconds of the Trump’s meme coin announcement on Truth Social Friday evening, the wallet emptied its entire $1 million clip by purchasing over 5.9 million TRUMP tokens. Within hours, those tokens were worth over $116 million.
The trader then split their massive stash of TRUMP tokens into 10 different Solana wallets and began selling off huge portions of it the next day, according to analysis by the on-chain research firm Bubblemaps. By Monday morning, the trader had sold $85 million worth of TRUMP and was still sitting on another $75 million, according to Bubblemaps. At the moment, blockchain data shows that the wallets combined only hold $18 million worth of the meme coin, with the trader presumably having sold off most of the stash.
The story doesn’t end there, though. On Sunday, First Lady Melania Trump followed her husband’s lead and launched a meme coin of her own—and our lucky trader was early here again. One of the wallets connected to the user purchased a massive amount of the MELANIA token within a minute and a half of the First Lady posting about it on Truth Social, and a full minute before any information about the token had been posted to X.
The trader sold $45 million worth of TRUMP to apparently fund the purchase of a massive MELANIA bag, which caused the TRUMP token to crash nearly 50% in a matter of minutes on Sunday afternoon, according to Bubblemaps.
Stories have abounded on X of several other early buyers of the TRUMP token who profited handsomely, leading to suspicion of widespread insider trading. Decrypt has been unable to confirm that any insider information was indeed shared, but the cluster of connected wallets associated with the “6QSc2” account that scored big is enough to raise eyebrows.
That’s especially true when considering the fact that this trader placed such an unusually large buy order before most crypto users had absorbed the news and realized it wasn’t the result of an elaborate hack.
It’s possible, though, that this trader just happened to be in the right place at the right time, with a fresh wallet locked and loaded, and made the right call. The transaction history of the connected wallets suggests this is a user who buys and sells a lot of meme coins—and has done so for at least the past three months. This trader even sniped some of the Hawk Tuah girl's meme coin during its ill-fated launch.
It’s also possible, however, that this is someone who is very well connected and got tipped off that the Trump meme coin was coming. And if insider information was in fact at play, the leak may not have necessarily come from Trump’s inner circle or crypto team.
Several Solana decentralized finance projects—such as Jupiter, Meteora, and Moonshot—revealed over the weekend that they worked with the TRUMP token team in advance to ensure a smooth launch.
The token led to unprecedented levels of activity on the Solana network, and many people had to work together to make sure the infrastructure would hold. It’s not clear, however, how many employees at these projects had personal knowledge of plans for the coin ahead of time, and there’s currently no evidence to suggest wrongdoing from any provider.
At least one high-profile crypto personality, though, appeared to brag openly about receiving inside information ahead of time about the impending launch of the MELANIA token. Ran Neuner, the co-founder and CEO of blockchain investment fund Onchain Capital, seemed to admit as much in a post to X on Monday, lamenting that the Trumps, in his view, were now “grifting at the expense of the crypto community.”
“Don’t get me wrong,” Neuner wrote. “As my timeline shows, I kn[e]w about MELANIA way ahead of the launch and obviously profited.”
Indeed, nearly 90 minutes before the First Lady posted her first announcement about the token on Truth Social, Neuner posted about the soon-to-launch MELANIA token publicly.
Decrypt reached out to Neuner regarding the post but did not receive a response.
Trump’s token is up 8% on Tuesday, to $43.94 at writing. The token still boasts a fully diluted value of over $43 billion. MELANIA, meanwhile, is down nearly 24% on the day, to $4.60 at writing and a fully diluted value of $4.6 billion.
