President-elect Donald Trump couldn’t wait until his Monday inauguration to make good on his promise to be the first “crypto president” — so we won’t wait either. We have a special breaking-news edition of the newsletter covering what to know. First time reading? Join 190,000 self-directed investors gaining an edge every morning. Sign up here. 

Instant billions

Around 10 p.m. ET on Friday, Donald Trump launched a memecoin bearing his own name, “TRUMP.” 

Some traders initially thought the president-elect’s social media account was hacked, and that the token was a scam. Early hesitations, however, did nothing to stop the nascent cryptocurrency’s meteoric rise. 

It climbed 4,000% within four hours of its debut — nearly doubling the S&P 500’s return of the last 30 years in the blink of an eye.

It had opened trading at just a few pennies, but by midday Saturday it changed hands above $30 per token.

That translates to a roughly 16,944% return since launching, as of 1:45 p.m. ET.

Some traders posted screenshots of their portfolios on social media showing TRUMP had turned them into millionaires. 

One important detail is that just 20% of the cryptocurrency’s total supply is currently available.

The other 80% — presumably held by the president-elect and members of his inner circle — is scheduled to gradually enter the market over the next three years. Officially, that supply is owned by the Trump-affiliate organizations CIC Digital LLC and Fight Fight Fight LLC, according to state filings.

As of this writing, the market capitalization of the available tokens on the market hit $6 billion. Meanwhile, the total fully-diluted value — which represents the market cap if 100% of the supply was available on the market — hovered above $30.6 billion.

To put that in context, that makes TRUMP roughly as valuable on paper as Hershey’s, Reddit, and Kellogg’s, and more valuable than Zoom, Warner Bros. Discovery, and the Carlyle Group.  

Another interesting detail, too, is that the incoming president launched TRUMP while hosting an invite-only, black-tie event for the crypto industry in Washington DC. Attendees ranged from executives of financial firms to Snoop Dogg and Trump’s Treasury chief nominee, Scott Bessent. 

To be clear, this is untested territory for both the political and investing world. It aligns with Trump’s ambitions to make the US the “crypto capital of the planet” and create a strategic bitcoin stockpile.

Whether his new memecoin gains more momentum or crashes to zero, it pushes the broader industry even deeper into mainstream consciousness — right on the eve of what’s sure to be the first of many pro-crypto administrations.

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