President-elect Donald Trump launched a memecoin on Friday that quickly topped a $10 billion market cap after nearly just an hour.
A tweet from his Truth Social account and his verified X account announced $TRUMP just before 10 PM EST. A little more than an hour later, it was trading with a market cap above $10 billion.
"My NEW Official Trump Meme is HERE! It’s time to celebrate everything we stand for: WINNING! Join my very special Trump Community. GET YOUR $TRUMP NOW. Go to http://gettrumpmemes.com — Have Fun!" Trump tweeted.
Despite many thinking the memecoin was potentially the result of a hack, the site advertising the memecoin matched the same company behind Trump's prior NFT projects, according to Coinage.
The token launched with 200 million tokens at generation and described a token lockup that would eventually scale to 1 billion tokens, with 80% scheduled to be allocated for the creator team and CIC Digital. No tokens allocated to the team would be released before three months, according to the distribution schedule.
The token launch comes as Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Gensler steps down and just three days before Trump's inauguration on Monday.
The token launch appeared to be a boost for the chain Trump's memecoin launched on. Solana was up about 6% after the launch as money flowed in. Other cryptos had taken a dip as traders may have shifted funds to account for the surprise token drop.