Melania Trump has been criticized by people from both the crypto space and political parties after she launched her own meme cryptocurrency called $MELANIA earlier today.
This was just two days after her husband, President Donald Trump, launched his own token called $TRUMP, which has done over 19 billion in market cap already.
$MELANIA got a lot of attention quickly but also caused a lot of confusion in the market, which led to a FOMO like situation.
Immediately after the launch of $MELANIA, the price of TRUMP, which had been going up, quickly began to fall. It lost $7.5 billion in market value in less than 10 minutes.
In short, many traders dumped the $TRUMP token and rushed to buy the first lady’s coin which pushed its price to $17 in a few minutes and gave it a fully diluted market cap of over $5 billion.
However, $MELANIA price later lost its interest as the token crashed to $7 in hours after its surge, which dropped its market cap to $2 billion.
“This is beyond insane,” said analysts at The Kobeissi on X. “Less than 48 hours ago, Donald Trump launched $trump, which just erased $7.5 billion in market cap in 10 minutes. In the minutes around the launch of Melania Trump’s token, we saw massive sell orders in $trump.”
Traders are now more perplexed than ever, with many speculating that this could be yet another instance of pump and dump.
One user on X shared a picture of his destroyed workstation, saying that he “lost everything” trading the token.
Another user on X (formerly Twitter), InvestmentKage, said, “88% of $MELANIA Meme coin is owned by 10 people. This is straight-up dumb. If you’re buying any of this you are straight up gambling.”
This was also confirmed by the blockchain analytics platform Bubblemaps, which revealed that 90% of the token supply is held in a single wallet. This contradicts the project’s claim of daily distributed allocations.
The backlash went on with anti-Trump people like Brian Krassenstein and artist Art Candee criticizing the coin as a type of corruption. They said that the Trump family was making money at the cost of unaware investors.
Meidas Touch, a pro-democrat, also showed his worries, saying that the pair was “making billions” while many people were risking their money.
“We are witnessing the beginning stages of the “rug pull presidency.” Trump, his family, and his cronies are already profiting off the office to the tune of billions of dollars. Your life will not get better. Not one bit.” he tweeted.
Even conservative people were confused by the launch. One pro-Trump account on Truth Social wrote, “What’s with the meme coins?. First Trump, now Melania… we have some big problems to fix and you think this is the right time to sell coins?”
Another user on X even criticised the president’s token: “The President-elect is literally doing a pump and dump right before our eyes” he tweeted.
But despite this criticism, $MELANIA coin seems to be holding up. Although it has fallen short. Data from Solscan showed that more than 22,000 wallets are still holding the MELANIA coin.
People think its price may go up more if the project shares important updates like a clear whitepaper or plan. Trump is about to take oath in Washington D.C., maybe he’ll share some new info today, who knows? However, it’s important to be cautious of risky trading and marketing tactics.
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