The coin’s price has surged more than 30% since the announcement, to about US$12, boosting the value of the crypto wallets owned by a digital firm affiliated with Trump’s family business, the Trump Organisation, by roughly US$100 million, the review shows.
The Trump-allied team who launched the meme coin also earn fees when the coins are bought or traded, including via a debit-card-friendly “buy now” button on the coin’s website. The team have earned US$1.25m in fees over the past week, the analysis found.
Trump has frequently promoted his desire to turn the United States into the “crypto capital of the planet” and two of his sons, Eric and Donald Trump jnr, have described the $TRUMP coin as the “hottest digital meme on earth”.
The dinner promotion “creates the spectre of a pay-to-play deal” for wealthy spenders eager to bend the President’s ear, said Virginia Canter, the chief ethics counsel for watchdog group State Democracy Defenders Action and a former White House associate counsel under President Barack Obama.
“He’s actually selling access, personal access, to him and to the White House if people invest in this meme coin, which really has no intrinsic value,” Canter said.
“If you are a foreign government burdened by tariffs, will you be enticed to invest? If you’re a criminal felon, will you maybe invest in hopes they’ll give you an opportunity to make your case for a pardon?”
Senanor Chris Murphy (Democrat, Connecticut) posted on X: “This isn’t Trump just being Trump. The Trump coin scam is the most brazenly corrupt thing a President has ever done. Not close.”
The White House did not respond to requests for comment. Trump Organisation officials also did not respond.
The meme coin project is run by a Trump Organisation affiliate and a Delaware-registered company called Fight Fight Fight that together own 80% of the coins. (That company, led by a Trump friend and entrepreneur named Bill Zanker, is named for Trump’s rallying cry after his attempted assassination last year in Pennsylvania.)
The coin is one of several Trump-brand crypto ventures launched within the past year, including a company called World Liberty Financial, which offers a separate crypto token named WLFI that calls itself “inspired by Donald Trump”.
Since launching days before the inauguration in January, the meme coin has earned for Trump and his business partners about US$41 million in fees and US$312 million in sales of the coin, according to the Post analysis.
The Trump meme coin team said only the coin’s top 220 holders would be invited to the gala dinner and created an online leaderboard to rank the anonymous accounts, who are known only by their crypto wallet’s addresses and usernames such as “elon”, “MTGA” and “boop”.
At least 15 wallets hold more than 100,000 of the $TRUMP meme coins, the leaderboard says.
The Post used data from Flipside Crypto, Arkham Intelligence and the Meteora decentralised exchange to analyse meme coin transactions on the blockchain, a sort of public database that logs crypto activity. Though many wallets aren’t tied to a real person’s identity, their trades are linked to standardised address codes and other pieces of data that allow them to be tracked around the web.
The Post review found several of the coin’s recent acquirers have received funds from Binance, a crypto exchange that doesn’t allow US customers, suggesting they may not be Americans.
The biggest wallet on the leaderboard, calling itself “Sun”, has more than 1.1 million of the coins, a stake now worth more than US$13 million on paper. The wallet is registered by HTX, a crypto exchange founded in China whose global advisory board includes the crypto billionaire Justin Sun.
Sun invested $30 million in Trump’s World Liberty Financial last year while under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on charges of fraud. The SEC asked a federal judge to halt the case in February and the Justice Department this month directed prosecutors to no longer pursue or investigate certain kinds of crypto crimes. (Neither Sun nor HTX immediately responded to requests for comment.)
The meme coin’s website, which includes heavily edited photos of Trump at a dinner table, says the gala dinner is “one of the most exclusive events in the world” and that invitees will have to pay all expenses, including for the meal, parking and tips.
The top 25 coin-holders will also be invited to tour the White House and attend a private “VIP reception” with Trump. But the team warn in the terms and conditions that Trump may not be able to attend the dinner, which “may be cancelled for any reason”. If Trump cannot attend, the fine print says, meme coin-holders could instead receive a “limited edition” Trump NFT or non-fungible token – the crypto equivalent of a digital trading card.
But some shareholders in Trump Media & Technology Group, the public company that runs the social network Truth Social, have expressed frustration at how crypto investors might get special treatment. Chad Nedohin, an investor and long-time cheerleader of Trump Media’s stock on Truth Social, posted there on Wednesday, “Where’s the part for [Trump Media] OGs who’ve been wiped out for 4 years?” he said, using a slang term for “original gangster”. (Nedohin did not respond to requests for comment.)
Even with the past day’s boom, the meme coin’s value remains nearly 90% lower than its initial peak of about US$74, which it reached between its launch on January 17 and Trump’s inauguration on January 20.
The meme coin team continued promoting the offer on Thursday, posting on X that the private event would not be recorded. “This is real, in the room, shoulder to shoulder with Greatness,” the post says. “No second chances. If you’re in crypto, you need to be there.”
