According to Arkham Intelligence, On January 22, the holdings of MAGA (TRUMP) tokens at Donald Trump's address surpassed $1 million amid the rise in memecoin’s price. The politician himself did not buy these assets but received them from developers in several transfers from August to October 2023.
What is the MAGA (TRUMP) memecoin
The MAGA (TRUMP) memecoin appeared in August 2023. The token is currently available on the Ethereum and Solana blockchains.
Its name refers to Donald Trump's last election slogan, "Make America Great Again". Like any such memecoin, it has no technical utility; all the focus is on the community activity and the hype surrounding it.
As stated in the disclaimer on the official website, the token "is not affiliated with or endorsed by Donald J. Trump" and has no partnership with the politician. The project does not even have a roadmap. However, there is information about donations, charity, and other activities that the community does.
As one way to draw attention to their token, the developers sent tokens to the politician's address.
How Donald Trump got MAGA on his wallet
The first token transfer at Trump's address was on August 19, 2023: 469,901 TRUMP. At that time, the price of the token, according to CoinMarketCap, was $0.012. So, the transfer amount in dollars at that time was about $5,600.
Then, there were two more transfers (first and second) in October. After them, the total number of TRUMP tokens at the former president's address reached 579,281.
Why MAGA grew in January 2024
Since January 2, 2024 the token price has increased by almost 800% — from $0.265 on January 2 to a high of 2.3526 on January 21. Thus, at a price of $2.35, Trump's holdings in MAGA tokens were valued at around $1.3 million.
Such growth can be attributed firstly to the token's listing on the Bitmart exchange in early January, and to the growing interest in politics due to the fact that two candidates from the Republican Party of the United States, Vivek Ramaswamy and Ron DeSantis, left from the election race on January 16 and 21, respectively, and supported the candidacy of Donald Trump.
At this point, the price has dropped and is now around $1.44. So, now Trump has approximately $800,000 in MAGA tokens.
Why developers are sending tokens to celebrities’ addresses
Trump's address has 579,281 MAGA tokens, and they all came from the memecoin team. It is a common story when developers send tokens to the addresses of celebrities. There are a few motivations here.
Firstly, it is an attempt at promotion, although not the best, aimed to create the impression that the coin holders are famous personalities.
Secondly, it is believed that sometimes it is a way to "burn" tokens because celebrities rarely pay attention to them.
For example, we can take the address of Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin. There is a lot of token spam on his address. Most of them are probably scams.
Vitalik had an interesting story with the memecoin Shiba Inu. In the spring of 2021, someone sent just over half of the entire SHIB token supply to his address — 505 trillion out of a quadrillion. According to the project's whitepaper, this was done in order to burn the tokens. Buterin, on his part, could have done whatever he wanted with them, but in the end, he burned 90% of them and donated the other 50 trillion to India's COVID-Crypto Relief fund. At the time, these tokens were valued at over $1 billion. This marketing stunt brought the SHIB memecoin to fame.
What Donald Trump will do with the received tokens is difficult to predict. But for sure, we can assume that if the coins start suddenly moving from his address, the price will drop as holders may perceive this as a signal to sell. On the other hand, Trump still holds some ETH from the sale of his NFT collections, so it is possible that he is playing for keeps. But it is also possible that the politician can just forget about tokens lying at his address.
Be careful when investing in such memecoins. They are volatile, with their price too exposed to news, which requires constant monitoring.
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