Donald Trump-Themed Meme Coins Breed Crypto Millionaires as MAGA Token Surged

The young PoliFi crypto sector, a frontier where politics, finance, and cryptocurrency converge, has minted a new class of millionaires as a token themed after Donald Trump surged in the past few weeks, analysis by on-chain data provider Nansen shows.
While the issuance of the TRUMP token has nothing to do with the former U.S. President Donald Trump directly, traders are using the tokens as a speculative bet on his ongoing presidential campaign.
In the past two weeks, the Trump MAGA (TRUMP) token is up nearly 75%, according to CoinGecko data. It surged 14% on Tuesday as the Trump campaign said it would begin to accept crypto donations, including bitcoin (BTC), ether (ETH), and meme coins dogecoin (DOGE) and shiba inu (SHIB).
From all this, some holders of the MAGA meme coin – the first experiment in a new category of tokens called PoliFi, which has a collective market cap of $749 million – have seen returns of over 1,600%.
One such address is sitting on over $5.5 million worth of the token.
Several addresses purchased low six-figures in TRUMP tokens and are now sitting on unrealized gains of over $1 million. They are gradually trimming their holdings but not selling in a manner that could cause a sudden price dump. As such, these sales were made before Tuesday’s campaign donation announcement.
However, recent buyers of the TRUMP token are posting a poor return on investment and have a low overall win rate, the data showed.
Meanwhile, the value of TRUMP holdings sent to a wallet linked to the actual Donald Trump has risen to nearly $5 million.
A wallet supposedly linked to Trump received $7,100 of TRUMP from the meme coin’s developers between August and October 2023.
Sending tokens to a wallet linked to popular entities is sometimes used as a marketing strategy by meme coin makers, as they can attract eyeballs – and galvanize investor interest.
Edited by Omkar Godbole.

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Shaurya is the Deputy Managing Editor for the Data & Tokens team, focusing on decentralized finance, markets, on-chain data, and governance across all major and minor blockchains.

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