Author: flowie, ChainCatcher
Although Trump claims to "not understand too much" about his namesake Meme coin TRUMP, the Trump family's entire crypto layout undoubtedly has a powerful "behind-the-scenes" operation.
The seemingly casual launch of the TRUMP coin was actually the result of prior cooperation with multiple project parties such as Moonshot, Jupiter/Meteora, which are the biggest beneficiaries of Trump's epic token issuance, apart from Solana.
For example, Moonshot, which supports fiat currency purchases of memes, quickly added 400,000 new users and became a strong new challenger to CEXs. Meteora, the same team as Jupiter, is the fastest growing project in the Solana ecosystem's Trump token issuance dividend...
The primary supporters/beneficiaries of Trump's token issuance
Moonshot—— Added 400,000 users, a challenger to CEX
After the launch of the Trump token (TRUMP), Moonshot, the official purchase channel recommended by Trump, added over 400,000 new users and processed nearly $400 million in transactions within 24 hours. Due to the trading frenzy of TRUMP tokens, Moonshot briefly topped the free finance category on the US Apple App Store, surpassing Coinbase, PayPal and Robinhood.
According to data from @sliceanalytics on Dune, Moonshot added 187,400 new on-chain users through TRUMP alone, while the previous hot Tiktok concept meme Chillguy only brought in over 7,200 new users.
Currently, the cumulative trading volume of TRUMP on Moonshot has reached nearly $750 million.
After Trump's token issuance, Robinhood also partnered with Moonshot, allowing Robinhood's over 20 million users to seamlessly deposit funds into Moonshot, opening up more traffic for Moonshot.
Moonshot is not the Meme launch platform launched by DEXScreener, but is affiliated with Pump.fun, both of which were incubated by Alliance DAO.
Shortly after its launch in July last year, Moonshot was recommended by meme super-shill king Murad. Its feature is to support fiat currency charging of memes. Users can quickly top up funds through common payment methods such as Apple Pay, credit cards, and PayPal, without having to manage complex blockchain wallets or pay Gas fees.
Moonshot has gathered a large number of popular Meme coins, including many tokens that have not yet been listed on secondary or top exchanges.
Around October last year, Moonshot really became popular due to the "listing effect" of quickly listing MOODENG, SPX6900, Chillguy, GOAT and other large MC memecoins, known as the "Binance of the meme world".
Because it can quickly accept fiat currency deposits, Moonshot is more likely to attract users outside the circle, and MOODENG and Chillguy are both concept coins on Tiktok.
This time, the presidential meme TRUMP, which quickly reached $300 billion, is expected to become the best banner for Moonshot's "listing effect", and the platform's subsequent listing effect and carefully selected tokens are worth continued attention.
Moonshot can also allow a large number of users to directly bypass CEX and participate, also posing a threat to CEX.
Moonshot has not yet revealed any plans to issue its own token.
Jupiter/Meteora—— Stirring up the Solana DeFi landscape
Jupiter is the largest DEX aggregator on Solana, a well-known star project in the crypto community. Meteora, Solana's stable asset liquidity platform, may not be familiar to many users. In fact, Meteora and Jupiter are from the same founding team, with the Jupiter team founding Meteora after creating Jupiter.
Meteora was originally called Mercurial Finance and issued the MER token in 2022, but due to the impact of the FTX event, the brand was renamed to Meteora and the MER token was abandoned. Meteora also never issued the planned new MET token.
Jupiter and Meteora respectively provided LFG technology stack and liquidity support for Trump's token issuance.
After the launch of the Trump token, Jupiter posted on the X platform that the issuance of TRUMP used the same LFG technology stack as JUP, including DLMM pools, ILM design and tight Jupiter integration.
Jupiter stated that through close cooperation with the Meteora team, they ensured the smooth issuance of TRUMP, not only on Jupiter, but also across the entire ecosystem using the Jupiter API (including applications like Moonshot).
On Meteora, it can be seen that the TRUMP team injected 10% of the initial liquidity into the TRUMP/USDC trading pair through Meteora, using the DLMM mechanism to smoothly sell over $500 million worth of tokens to the market.
The collaboration with Trump's epic token issuance has greatly benefited both Jupiter and Meteora, especially the originally little-known Meteora.
On the day of Trump's token issuance (January 18), Jupiter's daily trading volume surged to $16.8 billion, and the next day set a historical record of $20.6 billion, more than triple the usual $6 billion daily trading volume.
The growth of Meteora was even more dramatic, with trading volumes reaching new highs of $3.99 billion, $6.1 billion, and $4.7 billion from January 18 to January 20, about 8-10 times the usual $500-600 million trading volume.
Meteora has also become one of the most profitable protocols in the Trump effect. According to monitoring by @ai_9684xtpa, about 5 hours after the launch of TRUMP, the revenue of the main liquidity pool protocol on Meteora ranked second in the past 24 hours across the network, second only to Tether, with LP revenue reaching $12.2 million. If estimated based on the average hourly fee income, it will reach $58.08 million in 24 hours.
On January 21, according to DefiLlama data, Meteora's 24-hour fee income reached $111.93 million, surpassing Solana to rank first.
Meteora has also eroded Raydium's market share, disrupting the Solana ecosystem DeFi landscape. According to Blockwork's data, Raydium was previously the largest revenue earner in Solana meme trading, with a market share generally around 90%. After the launch of the TRUMP token, it dropped to 30%, while Meteora's share of Solana MEME token trading rose from less than 10% to 60%.
Recommended reading:"Trump's Token Issuance Disrupts Solana DeFi Landscape: Meteora's Daily Trading Volume Soars 8-fold, Raydium's Share Drops to Less Than 30% in the Short Term"
Wintermute—— Its market-making projects become a wind vane
After the launch of the Trump token, Wintermute quickly supported OTC trading of the TRUMP token, and further announced support for trading TRUMP tokens through its API, providing Streaming and RFQ pricing.
Previously, on-chain analysis had pointed out that the largest holding address of TRUMP was suspected to be Wintermute, indicating that Wintermute may have cooperated earlier to provide market-making services for the TRUMP token.
Previously, the meme and AI agent craze made Wintermute's market-making projects, holdings and trading dynamics a wind vane for many players.
At the end of November, according to analysis by @ai_9684xtpa, 64% of the TOP25 Meme tokens that Wintermute was market-making had been listed on Binance, with 6 tokens listed on both spot and perpetual contracts.
Crypto KOL @NFTbigbanana also analyzed Wintermute's market-making path, with the most obvious signals coming from the official Twitter, where @wintermute_t may have followed or interacted with relevant meme tweets before market-making, or made small token transfers to the Wintermute wallet; then there was the wash trading to accumulate, with Wintermute's wash trading characterized by long duration (6 months+) but not too large retracements; finally, a large-scale pump.
Players can observe Wintermute's trading dynamics and associated addresses through platforms like arkm.
Other meme infrastructure in the Solana ecosystem
In addition to Moonshot, Jupiter/Meteora and Wintermute as the supporting teams behind Trump's token issuance, who have enjoyed tremendous wealth, other meme infrastructure in the Solana ecosystem have also taken on a lot of traffic. DefiLlama data shows that the TVL of Solana ecosystem projects has generally risen in the past 7 days.
In the past 7 days, more than half of the top 20 projects by revenue are from the Solana ecosystem. In addition to Solana, they are mainly meme trading tools and trading bots, DEXs, ranked by revenue from high to low: Photon, Pump, Moonshot, MEVX, Phantom, BullX, BONKbot, Raydium, Trojan, DEX Screener, GMGN.
Why are Polychain and Justin Sun rumored to be the masterminds behind Trump's cryptocurrency launch?
It is currently difficult to draw a definitive conclusion about the exact orchestrators behind Trump's cryptocurrency launch. However, members of the Trump family and key team members of their previous crypto projects, especially WLFI, as well as pro-crypto officials in the new Trump administration, have been more or less involved.
In addition to Trump and his family members, the 5 co-founders of WLFI are Chase Herro, Zak Folkman, Steven Witkoff, Zach Witkoff, and Alex Witkoff.
While these five co-founders do not have deep crypto backgrounds, they do have some connections to the crypto space. Chase Herro has been involved in businesses such as cannabis sales and weight loss products, with a rather complex background, and has also collaborated with Zak Folkman, who has participated in the DeFi project Dough Finance. Zak Folkman also runs a "Date Hotter Girls" service and gives lectures on how to approach women, with a rather controversial background.
Steven Witkoff is a real estate developer and a friend of Trump, who donated $2 million to Trump's campaign and was appointed as a Middle East envoy. Zach Witkoff and Alex Witkoff are Steven Witkoff's sons.
The other five key business and advisory members of WLFI are closely related to crypto.
Corey Caplan, WLFI's head of technical strategy, is the co-founder of the DeFi project Dolomite.
WLFI's chief developer Bogdan Purnavel and blockchain lead Octavian Lojnita have both previously worked as developers at Dough Finance. Coindesk also reported that WLFI may have directly obtained code from Dough Finance in its early stages.
Rich Teo, responsible for stablecoins and payments, is the CEO of Paxos Asia.
In the advisory team, Sandy Peng is the co-founder of the Ethereum Layer 2 blockchain Scroll, Luke Pearson is a general partner at Polychain Capital, and Alexei Dulub is the founder of Web3 Antivirus and PixelPlex.
Notably, Scroll, one of the advisors, is also an L2 project led by Polychain Capital. Additionally, Polymarket, a prediction platform that Trump has repeatedly retweeted this year, is also a Polychain-led project.
As a leading VC firm in the US, Polychain has close ties with Trump and WLFI, and has long been speculated to be a key guiding force behind Trump's crypto initiatives.
Meanwhile, Justin Sun's close interactions with Trump's crypto project WLFI and meme coins around the time of Trump's coin launch have also led to market speculation that he may be a key advisor behind this Trump crypto initiative.
Looking at Justin Sun's recent actions related to Trump, on November 24, 2024, he invested $30 million in WLFI and became an investment advisor for the project.
On January 19, 2025, he further invested $45 million, accumulating a total investment of $75 million.
On the day of TRUMP's coin launch on January 18th, Justin Sun quickly facilitated its listing on the HTX platform, leading to a surge of over 100,000 new registered users on the Huobi platform in a single day, generating significant traffic benefits. Immediately afterwards, on January 20th, WLFI increased its TRX holdings twice, with a total value exceeding $7 million. In the future, the WLFI token will also be issued on the TRON blockchain and listed on HTX as a priority.
In addition to WLFI and other Trump-related crypto projects, key pro-crypto officials in the Trump administration, such as Vice President Vance, SEC Chairman Paul Atkins, and White House AI and Cryptocurrency Affairs Supervisor David Sacks, may also be involved.
David Sacks has revealed that he holds SOL and is a long-term supporter of Solana. His involvement may have played a role in the choice of Solana as the initial blockchain for Trump's coin launch.
