Trader who spotted Trump memecoin early turned $1 million into $90 million

When President-elect Donald Trump posted about the launch of a memecoin on the final business day before his inauguration, many feared that he had been hacked and it was fake. But one trader aped in regardless.

Within two minutes of the post going out on Truth Social, this trader swapped 1.09 million USDC for 5.7 million TRUMP tokens on the Meteora market, as highlighted by onchain analysts LookOnChain . They also paid an $85,000 tip to Jito, a Solana infrastructure company focused on MEV, a practice where blockchain users can pay more money to get their transactions through faster or at the top of blocks.

Shortly afterwards, this trader sent the TRUMP tokens to another wallet, known by its Solana name ff.sol. Then the funds were split up across many other wallets.

In the hours that followed, a portion of the tokens were sold for the stablecoin USDC in some of the wallets, a few also featuring other Solana names. In one wallet, some of the stablecoins were used to buy back TRUMP tokens before selling them again. LookOnChain estimates the trader sold 1.35 million TRUMP for $3.65 million in total.

This leaves 4.62 million TRUMP tokens, which are currently worth $87 million, bringing the trader's total holdings of TRUMP tokens and proceeds above $90 million.

The TRUMP memecoin has been on a huge rally since its launch just hours ago. The token has already reached a $4 billion market cap and broken into the top 40 tokens on CoinGecko. With a lot of the supply locked up, its fully diluted valuation is currently at $21 billion, which would rank it in the top 10 tokens if that was its current market cap.

Solana-based exchange Jupiter and Meteora have both made statements confirming the legitimacy of the Trump memecoin.