- The top 25 holders of Donald Trump’s personal memecoin, $TRUMP, held an average of US$4.8 million worth of the token at the time of the snapshot to determine who is eligible to attend a private dinner with the US president.
- The top holder, with the username ‘Sun’, holds approximately US$18 million worth of the token and is suspected to be Tron founder, Justin Sun.
- Meanwhile, a bitcoin mining operation backed by the Trump family is set to become publicly-listed in the US after a merger with another miner.
The top 25 holders of Donald Trump’s personal memecoin, $TRUMP, have been decided — and they’ll soon head to the Trump National Golf Club in Washington DC to attend a private dinner with the US President.
But what did these people pay for this extraordinary level of access to the US head of state?
According to $TRUMP’s official leaderboard, the top 25 token holders held an average of just under US$4.8 million (AUD$7.5m) worth of the token at the time of the token snapshot. This figure doesn’t necessarily reflect what the holders initially paid to acquire their holdings, as the price of $TRUMP has fluctuated enormously since its launch.
The average is also skewed by very large holdings — the leaderboard at the time of the snapshot shows the top user, identified as ‘Sun’, held over 1.4 million $TRUMP, currently valued at around US$18 million (AUD$28m).
The top holders were calculated using a ‘time weighted’ formula. According to the $TRUMP website, holdings were calculated “based on both the amount and duration of your $TRUMP holdings. The longer you hold the higher your weighted score becomes.”
While the top 220 $TRUMP holders are invited to attend the private dinner with Donald Trump, only the top 25 are considered VIPs. VIPs get access to a ‘private VIP reception’ with Donald Trump and will also be taken on a ‘special tour’.
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Justin Sun Suspected to Be Top $TRUMP Holder
The $TRUMP leaderboard includes not just the wallet address and holding size of each holder, but also their username. The top holder’s username is ‘Sun’, leading to speculation that the largest $TRUMP holder is none other than Tron founder, Justin Sun.
Sun is also the largest single investor in the Trump family’s DeFi project, World Liberty Financial (WLFI). Curiously, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) ‘paused’ its case against Sun in February, just after the crypto tycoon invested US$75 million (AUD$117.6m) into WLFI. Sun was facing charges for market manipulation, fraud and issuing unregistered securities related to Tron’s native token TRX.
Blockchain analytics firm Arkham has linked the wallet owned by ‘Sun’ to the cryptocurrency exchange HTX, where Justin Sun sits on the global advisory board, providing more evidence that ‘Sun’ could be Justin Sun. But the Tron founder is yet to confirm he’s behind this wallet.
While ‘Sun’ held an enormous amount of $TRUMP at the time of the snapshot, other VIPs held very little, and in one case held none at all. Because of the time weighted formula used to calculate top holders, it wasn’t actually necessary for accounts to hold any of the tokens at the time of the snapshot, so long as they held it through most of the accumulation window.
Now that the dinner competition has ended, the price of $TRUMP has started to fall. At the time of writing it was down 8.7% on the day according to CoinGecko. In an attempt to try to keep investors interested, the team behind Trump has offered incentives to continue holding the token, such as NFTs and a new ‘rewards points’ system.
Last week a group of Democratic senators introduced legislation to ban senior government officials and their families from creating or promoting cryptocurrencies. The move is seen as a direct effort to stop what the Democrats see as blatant crypto profiteering by Trump Administration insiders, most notably by the president himself.
Trump Family Backed Bitcoin Miner to Go Public
Despite growing criticism, the Trump family has continued to deepen its ties with crypto.
American Bitcoin Corp. — a BTC mining company — which is majority owned by Hut8 and partly backed by Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr., is to become publicly listed as part of an acquisition deal with Gryphon Digital Mining. American Bitcoin was launched in March of this year by a group of investors including Donald Trump’s sons, Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr.
Related: Bill to Ban US Officials Spruiking Crypto Introduced by US Democratic Senators
The merger is expected to be completed by the third quarter of this year and the newly combined company will be known as American Bitcoin. It will be led by American Bitcoin’s existing management team, including Eric Trump as chief strategy officer. It’s expected the company will trade on the Nasdaq exchange under the ABTC ticker.
According to Hut8, following the merger, “existing stockholders of American Bitcoin are expected to own approximately 98% of the combined company.”
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