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You never know when a huge pile of meme coins can turn into serious cash. Early Dogecoin (DOGE) investors know this well, as do Solana developers who received an airdrop of BONK. And the latest beneficiary of a meme coin glow-up is… former U.S. president Donald Trump?
An Ethereum wallet that blockchain analytics firm Arkham Intelligence previously tied to Trump, which holds a share of royalties from sales of the official Trump NFT collections, also holds over 579,000 MAGA (TRUMP) tokens. And a recent surge in price for the meme coins means that Trump’s holdings are valued at about $1.1 million as of this writing, as first reported by CoinDesk.
The TRUMP token has jumped 222% this week alone, per data from CoinGecko, and 689% over the past 14 days. Meme coins are famously volatile and can be driven by social media sentiment and real-world events, and Trump has racked up a pair of 2024 presidential primary wins in recent days as he attempts to win a second term in office.
Trump’s wallet isn’t associated with the creation of the TRUMP token, and in many cases, meme coins inspired by celebrities and public figures aren’t created by the person in question. Instead, they’re often created anonymously in an effort to ride the wave of hype and FOMO.
In this case, Trump’s wallet was sent the sizable allotment of TRUMP tokens across multiple transactions in August and October 2023, per public blockchain data tracked by Etherscan. At the time of the largest transfer, on August 19, the 469,901 tokens received on that date were collectively worth approximately $5,670, per data from DexScreener.
Now his stash of TRUMP tokens is valued at $1.1 million, making up the largest single holding in the Trump-affiliated wallet. Overall, it holds nearly $2.6 million worth of cryptocurrency as of this writing, including about $755,000 worth of Ethereum (ETH) and $731,000 worth of Wrapped Ethereum (WETH).
In December, the wallet dumped $2.4 million worth of ETH across a period of three weeks, following the launch of his third collection of NFTs minted on Ethereum scaling network Polygon. Only about half of the latest NFT collection has been minted so far, after the two previous collections both sold out.
The wallet was tied to Trump by Arkham last year following a financial disclosure notice from the former president, as the wallet receives royalties from the sale of his officially licensed NFTs.