Crypto community reacts to Melania Trump's memecoin: 'Gensler is laughing at us'

While President-elect Donald Trump's memecoin was largely met with skeptical enthusiasm from the crypto crowd, his wife's token launch has had a much harsher reaction.

"This is obviously a huge disappointment as it will dilute the Trump coin as well as the fact that more are likely to come which will just make it into one giant mess," wrote popular trader Daan Crypto Trades on X. "Everything going to dillute each other, massive [player versus player] between every coin and in the end people are going to be severely hit."

Melania Trump's token MELANIA went live just over an hour ago, amassing a $5.7 billion fully diluted valuation. Yet in achieving this, it has detracted massively from the Official Trump token , likely causing deep losses for many investors and potentially creating resentment among some of the 400,000 new entrants to the crypto space over the last few days. The price of TRUMP has fallen from $75 to around $45, bouncing off a low of $34 shortly following MELANIA's launch.

"Incredible. They actually launched a second MELANIA memecoin right in the middle of the first, signaling zero scarcity and instantly crashing the value of TRUMP," said investor Balaji Srinivasan.

"If this is actually true and it seems to be, Trump upside is probably very capped, no one wants to own something that constantly gets diluted," said popular crypto trader DonAlt on X. "All in all, a giant Trump fumble, might be the biggest self-inflicted mistake I've seen in crypto to date."

Or put more simply, "DONALD NO!!! ONE WAS ENOUGH!!!" wrote Monad Director of Growth Kevin McCordic.

Even worse tokenomics

Memeland's Chief Chart Officer, known as Stats, commented, "The $TRUMP coin had the perfect dose of mystery and reality for people to think this might just be a big thing. Then they do this." They noted that while Donald Trump kept 80% of the supply for himself and his team, Melania Trump kept 88% (with an even faster vesting schedule ) and suggested the next Trump to launch a memecoin might keep even more.

While Melania Trump's website says that around 45% of the supply is allocated to the community, public distribution and providing liquidity on decentralized exchanges, the current distribution is nowhere close. Blockchain data visualizer Bubblemaps noted that 89% of the supply of MELANIA remains in a single wallet, meaning just over 10% is currently available for trading.

"The bubble map of $MELANIA does NOT match the distribution on their website," Bubblemaps said on X.

Others noted that perhaps former SEC Chair Gary Gensler had not been exactly treated fairly in his crackdown on the crypto space. "I miss regulation by enforcement," joked Gwart, an anon once described as "crypto’s truth-telling funnyman."

"Gensler is laughing at us," added db, a pseudonymous individual who runs a crypto news monitoring service.

Much less planning

Some observers pointed out the difference between the planning between the two memecoins. Conor Grogan, head of product business operations at Coinbase, said the wallet that created Melania Trump's token had previously traded on memecoin launchpad Pump.fun and wasn't a multisig (like Official Trump's was).

"My guess is that this token was handled by a different team than TRUMP's. That one looks like professional market makers, this one honestly looks like a college kids," he posted on X.

Cygaar, a software engineer contributing to Abstract Chain, pointed out Melania Trump's website was set up yesterday and doesn't even have Cloudflare protection. "So yeah, people are definitely grifting here. At least the Trump coin was planned weeks in advance," they noted.