Behind Trump's coins, what are the primary "beneficiaries" and potential "traders"?

Author: flowie, ChainCatcher

Although Trump said he "doesn't know much" about his eponymous Meme coin TRUMP, the Trump family's entire crypto layout undoubtedly has a strong "operator" hand.

Behind the seemingly inadvertent launch of TRUMP coin, in fact, it has clearly reached early cooperation with multiple project parties such as Moonshot, Jupiter/Meteora, etc. They are the biggest beneficiaries behind Trump’s epic coin issuance except Solana.

For example, Moonshot, which supports legal currency purchase meme, quickly added 400,000 users and became a strong new challenger to CEX. Meteora, who is on the same team as Jupiter, is the fastest growing project in Solana Ecosystem’s Trump currency bonus... As Trump’s strictly selected partners, they deserve long-term attention.

The primary supporter/beneficiary of Trump’s coin issuance

Moonshot - 400,000 new users, a challenger to CEX

After Trump issued the currency (TRUMP), Moonshot, the official purchase channel recommended by Trump, added more than 400,000 new users within 24 hours and processed nearly $400 million in transaction volume. Due to the boom in TRUMP token trading, Moonshot once jumped to the number one free financial app on the US Apple App Store, surpassing Coinbase, PayPal and Robinhood.

According to @sliceanalytics statistics on Dune, Moonshot has added 187,400 new on-chain users through TRUMP alone, while Chillguy, a concept meme on Tiktok that was previously very popular, only brought more than 7,200 new users to it.

At present, the cumulative trading volume of TRUMP on Moonshot has reached nearly 750 million US dollars.

After Trump issued the currency, Robinhood also cooperated with Moonshot. More than 20 million users on Robinhood can seamlessly deposit to Moonshot. Opened up more traffic for Moonshot.

Moonshot is not a Meme launch platform launched by DEXScreener, but comes from the same company as Pump.fun, and both are incubated by Alliance DAO.

Shortly after its launch in July last year, Moonshot was recommended by meme super shouter Murad. Its feature is that it supports legal currency recharging for memes. Users can quickly recharge funds through common payment methods such as Apple Pay, credit card, PayPal, etc., without having to manage complex blockchain wallets or pay gas fees.

Moonshot brings together a large number of popular Meme coins, including many tokens that have not yet been listed on second-tier or top exchanges.

Around October last year, Moonshot officially became popular because of the "coin listing effect" of several big golden dogs such as MOODENG and SPX6900, Chillguy, and GOAT, which were listed early one after another. It was known as the meme version of Binance and the little Binance on the chain.

Because it can quickly deposit money with legal currency, Moonshot is easier to attract outside users. MOODENG and Chillguy are both concept coins on TikTok.

The speed-passing of the US$30 billion presidential meme TRUMP is expected to become the best sign of Moonshot's "coin listing effect". After that, the platform's currency listing effect and carefully selected tokens deserve continued attention.

Moonshot allows a large number of users to directly bypass CEX and participate directly, which also poses a considerable threat to CEX.

At present, Moonshot has not disclosed its currency issuance plan.

Jupiter/Meteora - Disrupting the Solana DeFi Landscape

As the largest DEX aggregator on Solana, Jupiter is a well-known star project in the encryption community. Many users may not be familiar with Meteora, the liquidity platform for stable assets on Solana. In fact, Meteora and Jupiter are the same founding team. The Jupiter team founded Jupiter only after they founded Meteora.

Meteora was originally named Mercurial Finance and issued the token MER in 2022. However, due to the impact of the FTX incident, the brand was renamed Meteora and the token MER was abandoned. The new token MET originally planned to be issued by Meteora has not yet been issued.

Jupiter and Meteora respectively provided LFG technology stack and liquidity support for Trump’s currency issuance.

After Trump issued the currency, Jupiter published an article on the X platform and mentioned that TRUMP was issued using the same LFG technology stack as JUP, including DLMM pool, ILM design and tight Jupiter integration.

Jupiter said that close cooperation with the Meteora team ensured the smooth release of TRUMP, not only on Jupiter, but also across the entire ecosystem that uses the Jupiter API (including applications like Moonshot).

As can be seen on Meteora, the TRUMP team injected 10% of the initial liquidity into the TRUMP/USDC trading pair through Meteora, and used the DLMM mechanism to smoothly sell over $500 million in tokens to the market.

Both Jupiter and Meteora have benefited a lot from this epic currency issuance cooperation with Trump, especially Meteora, which was originally unknown.

On the day Trump issued the currency (January 18), Jupiter's daily trading volume surged to US$16.8 billion, and hit a historical record of US$20.6 billion the next day, more than three times the usual daily trading volume of around US$6 billion.

The growth rate of Meteora is even more exaggerated. From January 18 to January 20, the transaction volume broke through new highs to US$3.99 billion, US$6.1 billion, and US$4.7 billion, which are about 8-10 times the usual transaction volume of US$500-600 million.

Meteora has also become one of the most profitable protocols in the Trump effect. According to monitoring by @ai_9684xtpa, about 5 hours after Trump issued the currency, TRUMP’s main liquidity pool protocol income in Meteora ranked second in the entire network in the past 24 hours, second only to Tether, with LP income reaching US$12.2 million. If the average hourly fee income is estimated, it will be as high as 58.08 million US dollars in 24 hours.

On January 21, according to DefiLlama data, Meteora’s handling fees within 24 hours reached US$111.93 million, surpassing Solana to rank first.

Meteora has also eroded Raydium’s market share and disrupted the Solana ecological DeFi landscape. According to data from Blockwork, Raydium was previously the largest revenue earner from Solana meme transactions, with a market share generally around 90%. After the issuance of the TRUMP token, it dropped to 30%, while Meteora’s share of MEME currency transactions on Solana increased from less than 10% to 60%.

Recommended reading: "Trump's coin issuance stirs up the Solana DeFi landscape: Meteora's daily trading volume soars 8 times, Raydium's short-term share drops to less than 30%"

Wintermute——Market making project has become a trend vane

Wintermute quickly supported OTC trading of TRUMP tokens after Trump issued the currency, and further announced that it supports trading of TRUMP tokens through API and provides Streaming and RFQ pricing.

Earlier on-chain analysis pointed out that TRUMP’s largest holding address is suspected to be Wintermute, and Wintermute may have previously cooperated to provide market making services for TRUMP tokens.

Previously, memes and AI agents became popular, and Wintermute’s market-making projects, position status and trading dynamics have also become the benchmark for many players.

At the end of November, according to analysis by @ai_9684xtpa, 64% of the TOP25 Meme coins marketed by Wintermute were listed on Binance, and 6 of them were listed on spot and perpetual contracts at the same time.

Crypto kol @NFTbigbanana has also analyzed wintermute’s market-making path. The most obvious signal is from official tweets. Before market-making, @wintermute_t may follow or interact with relevant meme tweets, or transfer small amounts of tokens to Wintermute wallet; and then there is Wash the market to attract funds. The characteristic of the market wash in winter is that it takes a long time (6 months +) but the retracement is not very large; in the end, the market pulls sharply.

Players can observe their transaction trends and associated addresses through the wintermute wallet address marked on platforms such as arkm.

Solana ecosystem and other meme infrastructure

In addition to Moonshot, Jupiter/Meteora and Wintermute, who are the support teams behind Trump’s coin issuance and have enjoyed great wealth, other meme infrastructure in the Solana ecosystem has also taken advantage of the trend to receive a lot of traffic. DefiLlama data shows that the TVL of Solana ecological projects has generally increased in the past seven days.

In the past seven days, more than half of the top 20 projects in terms of revenue came from the Solana ecosystem. In addition to Solana, they are mainly meme trading tool platforms, trading bots, and dex. They are sorted from high to low by income. Photon, Pump, moonshot, MEVX, Phantom, BullX, BONKbot, Raydium, Trojan, DEX Screener, GMGN.

Why are Polychain and Justin Sun rumored to be the dominant players when

Trump launches a currency?

It is currently difficult to determine the exact operator behind Trump’s coin issuance. However, various past encryption projects of the Trump family, especially key team members of WLFI, and pro-encryption officials in the new Trump administration were more or less involved.

In addition to Trump and his family members, the five co-founders of WLFI are Chase Herro, Zak Folkman, Steven Witkoff, Zach Witkoff and Alex Witkoff.

However, the encryption background of these five Lianchuang is not deep, but they also have some connections with encryption. Chase Herro has been engaged in cannabis sales and weight loss products and has a complicated background. He has also collaborated with Zak Folkman and participated in the DeFi project Dough Finance. Zak Folkman also runs the "Date Hotter Girls" service, giving lectures on how to pick up women, and his background is also more controversial.

Steven Witkoff is a real estate developer and friend of Trump. He donated $2 million to the Trump campaign and was appointed as the special envoy to the Middle East. Zach Witkoff and Alex Witkoff are both sons of Steven Witkoff.

WLFI's other five specific business leaders and advisory members are closely related to encryption.

Corey Caplan, WLFI’s head of technical strategy, is the co-founder of the DeFi project Dolomite.

WLFI chief developer Bogdan Purnavel and blockchain leader Octavian Lojnita have both worked at Dough Finance in development and other related work. Coindesk also reported that WLFI was suspected of obtaining code directly from Dough Finance in its early stages.

Rich Teo, head of stablecoins and payments, is the CEO of Paxos Asia.

Among the advisory team, Sandy Peng is the co-founder of Ethereum’s second-layer blockchain Scroll, Luke Pearson is the general partner of Polychain Capital, and Alexei Dulub is the founder of Web3 Antivirus and PixelPlex.

It is worth mentioning that Scroll in the advisory team is also one of the L2 projects led by Polychain. In addition, the prediction platform Polymarket, which has been forwarded many times by Trump this year, is also a leading investment project of Polychain.

As the leading VC in the United States, Polychain has close ties with Trump and WLFI. It has also been speculated to be the most critical guide behind Trump’s encryption layout.

Justin Sun's close interaction with Trump's encryption projects WLFI and meme coins before and after Trump's currency issuance has also caused market speculation. He is also the key guide behind Trump's currency issuance.

Looking at Justin Sun’s recent actions related to Trump, it can be seen that on November 24, 2024, Justin Sun invested US$30 million in WLFI and became the investment consultant of the project.

On January 19, 2025, Justin Sun invested another US$45 million, with a cumulative investment of US$75 million.

On January 18, the day TRUMP was issued, Justin Sun quickly pushed it to go online on the HTX platform. The number of new registered users on the Huobi platform exceeded 100,000 in a single day, and it also received a lot of traffic dividends. Then, starting from January 20, WLF launched twice Increased holdings of TRX, with cumulative value exceeding US$7 million. In the future, WLFI tokens will also be issued on Tron and listed on HTX as soon as possible.

In addition to Trump encryption-related projects such as WLFI, some key pro-encryption officials in the Trump administration may also be involved, such as Vice President Vance, SEC Chairman Paul Atkins, and White House Director of Artificial Intelligence and Cryptocurrency Affairs David Sacks.

David Sacks once revealed that he holds a position in Sol and is a long-term supporter of Solana. David Sacks, Trump’s first choice for issuing coins this time, may also play a role in Solana.