Trump’s “memecoin” crypto venture gained billions in value overnight

Donald Trump is cashing in in his final hours before assuming the presidency.

A cryptocurrency launched by the president-elect on Friday night, named $Trump in a similar matter to nearly all of his other ventures, reached a market cap of north of $6.5 billion overnight based on tokens available for sale. As of Saturday afternoon, the market cap hovered around $4.7 billion with an individual coin valued at nearly $23 as of this writing, per Coingecko.

In a message on X, Trump announced the “meme”-coin brandishing the words “fight, fight, fight,” a reference to the words he said after an assassination attempt last July.

Trump has previously made forays into the blockchain world, selling a series of NFTs last year and endorsing World Liberty Financial, a crypto trading company. The coin’s launch coincided with a black-tie pre-inauguration “Crypto Ball” in D.C., headlined by Trump’s incoming “Crypto Czar” David Sacks and attended by a who’s who of crypto industry insiders.

Crypto enthusiasts noted an alarming detail in the release, one which some said was a hallmark of an a-la-Hawk Tuah girl “pump and dump” scheme.

“CIC Digital LLC, an affiliate of The Trump Organization, and Fight Fight Fight LLC collectively own 80% of the Trump Cards, subject to a 3-year unlocking schedule,” a disclosure on the site reads. Another disclosure on the site claims the token is “not political and has nothing to do with any political campaign or any political office or governmental agency.”

Trump’s companies’ 80% share was worth over $4.5 billion on Saturday, though not all of their holdings are immediately available to sell. One trader joked that “Trump can just pardon himself and anyone associated with” the coin if he were to defraud token buyers.

The billions in shares of the token held by Trump’s companies is yet another potential conflict of interest for the president-elect who has vowed to be the most “pro-crypto” leader in American history. On Thursday, reports emerged that Trump was planning to designate cryptocurrency a “national priority,” potentially shoring up the valuation of his holdings.