U.S. President Donald Trump’s Solana-based meme coin is fast approaching its first token unlock, with the project’s team set to receive around 40 million Official Trump (TRUMP) next Friday.
Based on TRUMP’s current price, around $320 million worth of tokens will hit the market on April 18, according to crypto analytics platform Tokenomist. From that point on, around $4 million worth of TRUMP will be unlocked per day until the project’s next unlock event in July.
How will this first unlock impact the price of the president’s own official cryptocurrency?
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As TRUMP’s circulating supply inflates by 20%, people will become more inclined to sell, according to Sidney Powell, co-founder and CEO of DeFi lender Maple Finance.
He told Decrypt on Friday that token unlocks are typically bearish because they negatively impact an asset’s scarcity, requiring more demand to sustain current price levels.
The size of TRUMP’s upcoming unlock isn’t unusual, but the meme coin’s price may fall as investors wrap their heads around Trump’s 36-month unlock schedule, Powell said, which will gradually increase TRUMP’s circulating supply from just 200 million tokens at launch to 1 billion TRUMP in total.
“If you saw a bigger cliff, you’d be a little bit more worried about it,” Powell said, referring to instantaneous unlocks. “But obviously, once tokens start to unlock, more people will sell.”
Then again, the president’s meme coin has a unique owner base. TRUMP initially attracted waves of crypto newbies, with many wallets purchasing TRUMP as their first altcoin on Solana, based on data shared by the blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis in January. The launch was seen by many in the crypto industry as a mass onboarding event for mainstream users.
“They'll be less experienced, so those holders might not drive sell pressure,” Powell added.
TRUMP was recently changing hands around $8.13 on Friday, showing a 3.7% increase over the past day, according to crypto data provider CoinGecko. Even while up today, that price represents a nearly 89% drop from the asset’s all-time high of $73.43, which TRUMP hit less than two days after its January 17 launch.
The president’s meme coin can be used to purchase goods at Trump-linked venues like GetTrumpWatches.com, GetTrumpFragrances.com, and GetTrumpSneakers.com. But since the asset’s all-time high, around 191,000 wallets have sold their TRUMP, with less than 13,000 holding over $1,000 worth, according to on-chain data tracked via a Dune dashboard.
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Meme coins, which trade on little more than vibes, often have a short shelf life. In that sense, it’s amazing that Trump’s project still has a market cap of $1.6 billion, Matthew Nay, a research analyst at the crypto analytics website Messari, told Decrypt.
Sometimes, venture capitalists will promote a token ahead of its unlock event, hoping that hype can negate any of the associated sell pressure, Nay said. Following past promotions on social media, Trump could theoretically pull a similar maneuver, he added.
“I don’t expect there to be any classic token unlock pump,” he said. “Hopefully, the president has other things on his mind that he's worrying about.”
Edited by Andrew Hayward
