The latest controversy in the memecoin world has turned its focus to the $MELANIA project.

It has crypto community members raising eyebrows for what seems to be a controlled liquidity maneuver — a sell-off of sorts.

The latest chapter in the memecoin saga has crypto community members focused on the $MELANIA project and a claim that the project team has been engaging in a controlled liquidity maneuver—a sell-off, if you will.

Over the past month, the project team has divested 23.45 million $MELANIA tokens and did so in a way that shouldn’t affect the price much. But the team has been rumored to be using sketchy tactics to make it seem like the token is going places when it’s really just, um, not.

Most of the liquidity operations have been conducted from the other side of the price pool, allowing sales of up to 50% of MELANIA without triggering any large-sell alerts. The downside of this approach is that it pushes the price paid for MELANIA up, which is a bummer in the context of this activity being a sale to generate funds to pay for other aspects of the project, like team salaries. So why not sell to the buy side? Because that would trigger a public sell alert on-chain, and no one wants to be perceived as dumping their own project’s token.

The most recent activity occurred just seven hours ago, when the team transferred another 2.95 million $MELANIA tokens from its reserves and sold this latest batch for 9,009 SOL—which is around $1.2 million.

As with the previous token transfers, this one is being recorded in a pseudonymous fashion and, again, with this latest transfer, liquidity is being added in such a manner that the $MELANIA tokens are being sold in a kind of automated process as they are needed. And what’s really weird is that this was done in a range between a token price of 0.025 and 0.040 SOL.

7 小时前，又有 295 万枚 $MELANIA 被项目方以添加单边流动性的形式出售成 9,009 枚 SOL ($1.2M)。

过去 3 天里，$MELANIA 项目方继续从流动性跟社区地址转出 764.3 万枚 $MELANIA ($3.21M)，然后在 Meteora 上添加到 MELANIA/SOL 单边流动性，将 $MELANIA 在设定区间内出售成 SOL。其中 295 万枚… https://t.co/DCOMFOsGfzpic.twitter.com/zL2rIeTqOB

— 余烬 (@EmberCN) April 19, 2025

This is not a singular occurrence. In just three days, the team has moved 7.643 million $MELANIA—about $3.21 million—from liquidity and community wallets. “The tokens were also funneled into unilateral liquidity strategies that are offloading the $MELANIA for $SOL across a defined trading range,” Coindesk writes, referencing an Ocean Falls research report. “In layman’s terms, that means they’re selling $MELANIA for $SOL, but doing it in a way that won’t make the price of $MELANIA tank.”

Collectively, on-chain records indicate that over the last 30 days, the strategy of offloading $MELANIA has been executed a total of 23.45 million times. This constant sell-side pressure has funneled into accounts holding a cumulative total of 110,000 SOL, now worth around $14.75 million.

Although this liquidity management isn’t necessarily bad or malicious, it ain’t good, either, when the team behind the project failed to relay just what the hell their intentions were with the gathering of SOL.

Investors and community members are starting to wonder if this liquidity action is a clever way to build a treasury or if it’s really a prolonged exit strategy in disguise.

The ongoing liquidity injections have yet to make much of a dent in the price, and for this, we can thank the well-practiced team behind the project. They are selling tokens in a way that won’t get too many people too riled up in the short term—spreading sales across liquidity bands so as not to cause big on-chain price movements, for one. It’s almost like they are trying not to distribute the news that they are, in fact, distributing the tokens.

Some community members view this as a treasury strategy that is far from erratic. They see it as an intentional, well-thought-out, and well-planned treasury strategy. They see it as an intentional move to build up reserves. They believe those reserves are going to be used for what I would call traditional development or marketing efforts.

Others, however, see this as an outright betrayal of early supporters—a sellout, if you will. They see refusing to sell tokens as a kind of loyalty oath—and they see violating