One of Donald Trump’s most lucrative business ventures since being reelected president of the United States has been his own memecoin, a novelty type of cryptocurrency with no inherent value and which originates from a viral internet trend. Launching just a few days before his inauguration, it is a truly family affair, with one memecoin named after Trump himself ($TRUMP) and another after Melania ($MELANIA). Estimates indicate that all the family’s crypto ventures put together—including a crypto platform called World Liberty Financial, launched by Trump and his sons in 2024—have earned them around $1bn over the last nine months, according to Forbes.
Trump’s memecoin reached a high of $75 this January but has since dropped to $10. In the rankings of memecoins, however, this is a solid performance. $TRUMP lies ahead of Fartcoin and Bonk, but trails behind Pepe (named after a viral frog meme) and Dogecoin (named after a viral dog meme and, released in 2013, considered the first memecoin). Regardless of whether the price of $TRUMP goes up or down, every time a transaction takes place the president receives a fee. According to the New York Times, the Trump family and its business partners have collected $320m in fees alone in the past few months.
A prototypical feature of memecoins is humour and a community-driven ethos. Users of Fartcoin, for example, earn tokens by submitting a fart joke, and each transaction on the Fartcoin network triggers a digital fart sound and a “gas fee” sound effect.
What Trump’s memecoin might lack in humour it makes up for in classy perks for its buyers. The price soared in April when he invited the top 220 holders of the coin to a private gala dinner, the top 25 of whom were given an audience with the president beforehand at a “VIP reception” followed by a tour of the White House the day after. According to the Guardian, the Trump memecoin buyers spent about $148m to attend the event.
Buyers of memecoins are pseudonymous, making them harder to identify, meaning the system could be a haven for money laundering and corruption. When the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins coined the word “meme” in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, he described it thus: “The new soup is a soup of human culture. We need a name for a new replicator, a noun which conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. ‘Mimeme’ comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like ‘gene’. I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme... it should be pronounced to rhyme with ‘cream’.” Dawkins also gave some examples of what memes could be: “tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or building arches.” And now it seems we can add: ways of making billions of dollars in no time at all.
