A small group of crypto traders made nearly $100 million by buying Melania Trump’s memecoin minutes before it went public, research by the Financial Times has shown. Via the Daily Beast:
The first lady’s $MELANIA coin was unveiled on Jan. 19, the day before her husband was sworn in as president. It followed a similar move by Trump himself, who launched his own $TRUMP coin several days prior.
But analysis shows that in the two and a half minutes between the currency going live and Melania officially unveiling it to the public on Truth Social, two dozen digital wallets purchased tokens worth $2.6 million.
Following Melania’s announcement the price of the coins surged rapidly by over 5000 percent and most of the wallets that had purchased the cryptocurrency immediately sold off their holdings, with around 81 percent of traders selling the coin within 12 hours for massive profit.
One of the wallets, the Times reports, purchased $681,000 of $MELANIA 64 seconds before the announcement was made public. Within 24 hours, the same account sold the majority of their stock for $39 million when the surge was at its highest, before dumping the rest and making an additional $4.4 million over the next three days.
$MELANIA meanwhile saw an additional $900,000 worth of tokens purchased in the 42 seconds after it was announced, suggesting a degree of insider knowledge from the biggest buyers.
Would the last names of those insider traders happen to be $TRUMP? Just wondering!