Former US President Trump issued the official "President Coin" TRUMP, and the market cap reached as high as $80 billion in less than two days.
This event will undoubtedly become an important historical event. Whether for crypto practitioners or bystanders, this "Trump Coin Issuance Incident" will also be a good opportunity to iterate and update the understanding of the crypto industry.
As a participant and observer, I witnessed the entire process of the "President Coin" explosion, from discovering it at 10:50 am on January 18th (when TRUMP token was worth about $3 billion) to the end of the observation period on the evening of January 19th (when TRUMP token was worth $80 billion), and had extensive discussions with other crypto practitioners. I will try to summarize and record these observations and discussions.
Crypto Course for the President, Lesson 1: Opportunities are on-chain
If you don't play with products like Phantom and Jupiter DEXs (decentralized exchanges), you will most likely miss this TRUMP opportunity. If you don't have enough on-chain capital, you will also most likely not get high enough returns in this event.
The Trump Coin Issuance Event has become the most iconic turning point, indicating an irreversible trend: the center of cryptocurrencies is accelerating from CEXs (centralized exchanges) to DEXs (decentralized exchanges).
Within a day and a half after the TRUMP token was launched, without any major centralized exchanges listing the token, TRUMP's market cap reached $50 billion. Data shows that in January 2024, the trading volume of DEXs only accounted for 9.3% of CEXs, while in January 2025, this figure rose to 17.6%. These data indicate that DEXs are replacing CEXs to become the most important "gathering place" for crypto players.
In addition, the performance of the decentralized contract exchange Hypeliquid also surpassed many centralized exchanges in this event. Hypeliquid was the earliest exchange to list the TRUMP contract, launching it around 1 pm on January 18th, and it only took three hours to list the contract, when TRUMP's market cap was around $10 billion (the highest on the second day was $80 billion). The contract for First Lady Coin MELANIA was launched around 10 am on January 20th, and it took less than 5 hours to deploy the hot token contract.
Essential Crypto Products: Phantom, Jupiter, Uniswap
Crypto Course for the President, Lesson 2: The Fastest Wins
The TRUMP token was launched around 10 am on January 18th, with an initial price of about $0.18. By the evening of January 19th, TRUMP reached a high of $80, a gain of over 400 times.
During this period, you need to be quick to discover the opportunity and make decisions, in order to get in at a lower price.
The best traders bought TRUMP before 10:30 am, such as 0xSun, Dayu, and Yuyue, who are all KOLs. They share a common trait - they have the habit of monitoring smart money on-chain. The habit of monitoring on-chain wallets allows them to discover opportunities the fastest. Real-time monitoring of on-chain smart money requires products like GMGN, Debot, and Vector. Tech-savvy crypto practitioners may even write their own code to monitor the addresses of on-chain smart money.
Discovering the opportunity is the first step, and decision-making is the second step.
In this "Trump Coin Issuance Incident", the two platforms that need the most attention are Twitter and Moonshot, as they are important reference platforms for many crypto practitioners to decide whether to buy TRUMP. Trump's official Twitter post was at 10:44 am, which represents the authenticity of the event, and Moonshot listing the token at $1.21 further verifies the authenticity and significance of the event. This was the time window when most people could seize this opportunity.
Essential Crypto Products: GMGN, Vector, Debot, Twitter, Moonshot
Crypto Course for the President, Lesson 3: Cognition Determines Position, Tools Determine Speed
Cognition determines position. Some people bought early but bought little and sold earlier; some people bought late, but had more on-chain capital or used cross-chain products, and dared to take large positions. These ultimately determined the final results.
When TRUMP's market cap was $5 billion, some people were still doubting the authenticity of the event, but some had already determined that its market cap would exceed the $60 billion market cap of Dogecoin. Some people thought the on-chain capital could not bear a $60 billion new token in two days, while others had already understood the huge difference between TRUMP's market cap and its FDV.
If there was not enough SOL on-chain, you would also not use products like UniversalX to convert ETH to SOL, then you would most likely miss the big profits; if you didn't realize that TRUMP would surpass DOGE, then you would most likely miss the highest gains; if you didn't see TRUMP sucking blood from all other cryptocurrencies, then you would most likely miss the highest gains; if you didn't see the huge difference between FDV and market cap, then you would most likely miss the highest gains; if you didn't see the importance and breakthrough of Trump's coin issuance event, didn't realize the global consensus on the US President, then you would still most likely miss the highest gains; if you just saw TRUMP token as an ordinary meme, you would also miss the biggest gains... Tools determine the speed of asset flow, while cognition determines position.
Essential Crypto Products: UniversalX, GMGN, Coinmarketcap
Crypto Course for the President, Lesson 4: The Meaning of Meme
After Trump issued the coin, many "crypto big V" criticized Trump for using his power for private gain, and criticized meme as having only PVP attributes without any real value.
However, there seems to be no fairer asset issuance method than meme. When large centralized crypto exchanges have repeatedly violated rules with "high listing fees", "insider information", and "contract needle insertion", meme is the only fair asset issuance method; when some large public chains have "marketing costs of tens of millions of dollars a year", "complex interest groups", and "increasingly high entry barriers for new startups", meme is the only relatively fair asset that all participants can trust.
Before the emergence of AI Agent narratives, meme seemed to have never found a valuable application scenario, but after the emergence of AI Agent narratives, people found that meme is just a technical product form, and how to use it depends on people, not the meme itself. When AI Agent encountered meme, many practitioners also found that meme can also drive many interesting things.
Meme is not that good, but the old world is worse.
Essential Crypto Products: Pump.fun, Clanker, Virtuals, ai16z
In the End
The US President Trump issuing a meme coin is an unprecedented but not the last event of its kind. This has given everyone an extremely vivid crypto lesson.
In this lesson, some trends have become more obvious: DEXs are surpassing CEXs and becoming the new crypto center; Solana is surpassing Ethereum and becoming the new king of public chains; meme is subverting VC coins and advocating a fairer way of listing.
In this lesson, some products have gained huge exposure, with Moonshot adding 400,000 new users in a day and reaching 1 million daily active users; UniversalX's trading volume is 20 times its normal; the meme coin issuance platform Pump.fun is expected to have nearly $400 million in revenue this year; Phantom's single-day trading volume exceeded $1.25 billion, with over 8 million requests per minute, constantly challenging the transaction limits of blockchain products.
Trump's coin issuance is not just a simple combination of politics and cryptocurrencies, it has become an event that is even more groundbreaking than Bitcoin breaking $100,000, making a large number of people around who are not familiar with cryptocurrencies pay attention to this industry again. This news became the 7th hottest search on Weibo, topped the social news hot search list on Douyin, and became the headline news of major US media, with a surge in Google searches for Bitcoin...
The impact of this $80 billion "Trump Crypto Public Course" on the future is still fermenting.
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