Trump Entourage Holds $2.3 Billion in Memecoins

US President Donald Trump and his entourage have already made tens of billions of dollars in profits (at least on paper) from the official Trump (TRUMP) and Melania Meme (MELANIA) tokens launched on Solana over the past three days.

Now trading at $42, TRUMP has reached a market cap of $8.8 billion, making it the 25th largest coin in the entire crypto ecosystem, just behind some CoinDesk 20 coins such as polkadot (DOT) and litecoin (LTC). (The CoinDesk 20 is an index of the top 20 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization, excluding memecoins, stablecoins and exchange coins).

MELANIA, for its part, reached a market capitalization of $945 million, which places it 121st among symbolic projects.

On-chain data shows that the TRUMP Treasury wallet currently contains $35.5 billion in tokens, as well as $17.5 billion in other memecoins named after Trump family members, including Eric Trump and Kai Trump. The wallet reported to have launched Official Trump contains $622 million in token and nearly $162 billion in other coins, including $147 billion in another memecoin named after Vice President JD Vance. Unlike the Trumps, Vance did not indicate on social media that he was launching a memecoin.

Team Trump keeps MELANIA in a different configuration. Around 77% of the token supply is held in three different wallets, two of which have been labeled on Solscan as belonging to Team Melania, alongside a fourth wallet, which holds 3.7% of the supply. Assuming that all four wallets belong to the MELANIA team, the Trump family currently holds $4.8 billion of this token.

Importantly, two of these wallets – called Melania Treasury and Melania Liquidity on Solscan – which hold 33.7% of MELANIA’s supply between them, also each hold $295 billion worth of VANCE token. In fact, 25% of the VANCE token supply is held between these two MELANIA wallets and the TRUMP launch wallet.

Counting only official Trump and Melania Meme coins, Team Trump could hold approximately $40.9 billion on-chain. But if you add in all the other coins these wallets contain, that number jumps to around $810 billion.

And given that MELANIA and TRUMP wallets own a huge amount of VANCE tokens, it is likely that they are operated by the same entity that launched VANCE in the first place. If so, it’s worth pointing out that VANCE’s treasury currently holds nearly $1.5 trillion worth of memecoin. For reference, the total market capitalization of Bitcoin (BTC) hovers around $2 trillion. The Entourage’s total assets could be worth around $2.3 trillion, at least on paper.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that the Trump team will be able to liquidate that much. That’s a lot of paper wealth. These wallets hold a massive amount of supply of each token, so if Trump’s team starts taking profits, the selling pressure will likely blow up the market. He can’t make $35.5 billion in gains on a coin with a market cap of $8.8 billion, and the same problems apply to MELANIA and VANCE.

Anyone can create tokens for pennies and issue them on the Solana network. If 1 trillion tokens are created and a few tokens are exchanged for $1, the market cap of that memecoin would technically be $1 trillion. This means that the market capitalization can be manipulated by the creators of the token or early investors with minimal real activity in the market. VANCE has just over $2,000 in liquidity across two Solana-based pools, according to on-chain data. Liquidity refers to the ease with which a token can be bought or sold in the market without significantly impacting its price.

Additionally, the official Trump and Melania Meme projects have vesting schedules, meaning holders cannot sell their tokens whenever they want. The Trump team will have to wait at least three months to start selling, and even then they will only be able to turn a profit slowly, a few pieces at a time. The Melania Meme project, meanwhile, will begin to unlock in less than 30 days.

UPDATE (January 20, 2025, 8:35 p.m. UTC): The article has been edited to add more information on liquidity and market capitalizations.