**Key Takeaways**
The $TRUMP meme coin reached a market cap of $8 billion within two hours of launch.
Authenticity concerns arose due to the official announcement being shared on social media.
President-elect Donald Trump announced Friday he had launched Official Trump ($TRUMP), a Solana-based meme coin. The token exploded to $8 billion in market cap in less than three hours of its debut amid concerns that his social accounts might have been compromised.
$TRUMP’s value increased by more than 300% in the first three minutes following the announcement, with trading volumes approaching $1 billion, according to GeckoTerminal data. The token was trading at $8.5 at press time.
The announcement first appeared on Truth Social, directing users to GetTrumpMemes, the project’s official website, to acquire the tokens. A similar message was later posted on X (formerly Twitter), promoting it as the official $TRUMP meme coin.
There are serious questions about the legitimacy of both announcements and the project, especially in light of recent hacks targeting a wave of X accounts. After these announcements, Trump’s Truth Social account shared a new post appointing Peggy Schwinn as the new US Deputy Secretary of Education.
According to Cygaar, a blockchain engineer, the new meme coin project is likely created by the team behind Trump’s previous NFT project since their websites share several technical similarities.
“Same Cloudflare setup, same deployment with Heroku, same SSL certificate issuer. Very similar HTML structure as before,” he said, noting that both websites were deployed using Heroku.
“Either this is the greatest cyber heist of all time, or this is legitimate,” Cygaar added.
Slorg, a member of Jupiter’s Core Working Group, said $TRUMP has been verified and listed on Jupiter Exchange.
“I don’t like to tweet about coins, and in no way shape or form is this a promotion. But to keep people safe, this is the real Trump coin. We have approved it to the Jupiter strictlist,” said Slorg.
What we know so far?
According to GetTrumpMemes, the $TRUMP token draws inspiration from the “Fight, Fight, Fight” rallying cry that emerged after Trump’s life-threatening experience at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13, 2024. Those were the words he shouted upon surviving the assassination attempt.
The token has a total supply of 1 billion units, with 200 million available at launch. The remaining tokens will be released gradually over three years, with 80% allocated to the creators and CIC Digital, subject to a lock-up period of 3 to 12 months before daily unlocking over 24 months.
