Nearly one million retail investors have lost a combined $3.8 billion buying President Donald Trump’s $TRUMP memecoin, while the president personally cleared $636 million from the same instrument, according to a blockchain analysis by cryptocurrency analytics firm Nansen. The findings, first reported by TechCrunch and detailed in The New York Times, quantify for the first time the scale of losses absorbed by followers of the president’s crypto ventures.
The numbers behind the collapse
Blockchain analysis identified 988,905 wallets that had lost money on $TRUMP as of the end of June — approximately two out of every three buyers. The coin was trading at $1.69 on Sunday, down roughly 98% from its peak of $75.35 shortly after launch.
The distribution of outcomes is starkly asymmetric. Just under 500,000 wallets recorded profits from $TRUMP totaling roughly $4 billion, but this figure appears to reflect a small number of early, often algorithmic, buyers who exited before the retail majority arrived. The pattern — sophisticated wallets front-running slower retail flows into a token with a fixed launch window — is a well-documented feature of memecoin economics.
The issuer’s economics
Trump announced $TRUMP three days before his January 2025 inauguration. Financial disclosure records show the memecoin generated $636 million in personal earnings — nearly half of the $1.4 billion he made from the crypto industry last year, and part of at least $2.2 billion in total 2025 business income.
The structural point is that the issuer’s revenue was decoupled from the token’s price. Trump-linked entities collected a fee on every trade, meaning volume — not appreciation — drove the payout. The president repeatedly promoted the coin on Truth Social, urging followers to buy and trade. Each transaction, up or down, fed the same royalty stream.
A parallel structure exists at World Liberty Financial, the crypto start-up Trump co-founded with his sons. A Trump business entity collects 75% of $WLFI sales after certain expenses, guaranteeing profit regardless of the token’s trajectory. $WLFI now trades at $0.057, down 82% since it hit secondary markets in September.
The regulatory vacuum
The losses have not triggered enforcement action because the enforcement architecture has been dismantled. In February 2025, the Securities and Exchange Commission announced it would not treat memecoins as securities. The agency has since dropped a series of lawsuits against crypto companies. Asked about the findings, White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly defended the administration’s crypto policies, emphasizing President Trump’s role in advancing cryptocurrency adoption in the United States.
The $TRUMP website itself reportedly carries a disclaimer stating that the token is not an investment vehicle but rather intended as a show of support for the president. Legal experts have noted that such disclosures may not insulate the venture from eventual class-action litigation, though any case would likely wait until Trump leaves office.
What the ledger shows
The unusual feature of this episode is its auditability. Because most transactions settle on public blockchains, the transfer of $3.8 billion from retail wallets to the issuer and a narrow band of early traders is visible in a way that opaque financial products rarely are. The available data represents, in effect, a real-time settlement statement on a political-financial instrument sold by a sitting head of state to his own supporters — with the regulator that would ordinarily police such an arrangement having formally declared the arrangement outside its jurisdiction.
