A small group of traders made a staggering $99.6 million in profit

A small group of traders reaped a staggering $99.6 million in profit by purchasing Melania Trump’s $MELANIA cryptocurrency token in the minutes before its official announcement, according to an analysis by the Financial Times.

Melania Trump unveiled the $MELANIA coin in a social media post on January 19, just hours before her husband’s inauguration as the 45th U.S. president. However, a select group of digital wallets engaged in buying activity, accumulating a total of $2.6 million of the memecoin in the brief two and a half minutes before the post went live on Truth Social, the social media platform founded by Trump.

As the post hit the platform, the price of the coin experienced a surge, allowing the traders to offload most of their holdings for a significant profit. In the 12 hours following the announcement, 81% of the coins bought pre-launch were sold.

Memecoins, which are primarily speculative in nature and do not have inherent functions beyond speculation, often see massive price surges after the announcement of their launch. These pre-launch buying strategies are known as “sniping,” and the traders who engage in them are able to capitalize on the price jump, making outsized profits.

One notable transaction involved a wallet that spent $681,000 on $MELANIA coins just 64 seconds before the project was made public. Within 24 hours, the same wallet made an impressive $39 million from selling the majority of its holdings, with a further $4.4 million being made from the remaining coins over the next three days.

In total, 24 accounts collectively bought 16.7 million of the 200 million $MELANIA tokens that were available during the initial sale. In comparison, when Donald Trump’s own $TRUMP coin was launched, there were no pre-announcement purchases. Instead, the first transaction occurred 42 seconds after the Truth Social post went live.

This analysis follows a previous investigation by the Financial Times into the launch of $TRUMP, which revealed that entities behind its creation earned at least $350 million from both token sales and market-making fees. While the $MELANIA coin was launched by a separate group of companies, their profits from fees and primary sales have already reached $64.7 million.

The $MELANIA coin is currently trading at $0.33 per token. At this price, the 800 million $MELANIA coins retained by the organizers—which were not listed for public sale—would be worth an estimated $265.9 million.

The coin is marketed by MKT World LLC, a Delaware-registered company that Melania Trump has used for several ventures since 2021. However, the official terms surrounding the coin’s issuance and profit distribution remain unclear, with Melania Trump not responding to requests for comment. Crypto entrepreneur Hayden Davis, who has been linked to the launch of the coin, denied any wrongdoing in the creation of the token, claiming that no profits were taken from the Melania team. Davis was also involved in the controversial $LIBRA memecoin, which hit the news after its price surged and crashed.

The Financial Times tracked the $MELANIA token’s movements through digital ledgers known as blockchains. The analysis revealed that the 24 traders who bought into the token before the announcement profited substantially when the coin’s price spiked following Melania Trump’s post. Though crypto transactions are publicly available on blockchains, the identities of the traders remain anonymous.