In brief
- Most TRUMP token VIPs have moved their holdings to centralized exchanges, presumably to sell.
- The average VIP holdings dropped from $4.78 million at the snapshot to $2.11 million as of Friday.
- TRUMP is down more than 14% one day after the president’s crypto dinner.
The majority of TRUMP meme coin holders that earned VIP status for President Trump’s exclusive gala dinner held none of the tokens in those wallets by the time they arrived for dinner at Trump National Golf Course on Thursday night.
On-chain data gathered from Solana block explorer Solscan shows that just eight of the top 25 VIPs maintain a balance of the president’s official Solana meme coin the day after the dinner, with the bulk of registered addresses having transferred tokens to centralized exchanges just days after the May 12 snapshot.
One of those eight wallets belongs to Justin Sun, the Tron network founder who confirmed he held the top spot on the Get Trump Memes leaderboard days before the event. Sun’s wallet, which held 1.43 million TRUMP at the time of the dinner snapshot, still holds just under 1.4 million TRUMP tokens valued at around $18.8 million.
“As the top holder of TRUMP and proud supporter of President Trump, it was an honor to attend the Trump Gala Dinner,” Sun posted on X early Friday morning.
The second registered address on the leaderboard, identified as being associated with layer-1 meme coin blockchain MemeCore, maintains its entire balance from the snapshot on May 12, but only three other wallets from the top 10 have any TRUMP tokens.
The other five all transferred their balances to addresses labeled by Solscan as centralized exchanges like Coinbase and Binance, with one wallet transferring its TRUMP tokens to an account labeled as the Wintermute hot wallet.
While VIPs once held an average around $4.78 million worth of TRUMP tokens, the group’s average holdings now stand at approximately $2.11 million—buoyed in large part by the nearly $37.3 million in combined holdings from the top two holders.
By transferring or selling their tokens, the VIPs without balances will miss out on a limited edition “diamond hand” NFT, only earned by maintaining their leaderboard balances up until the dinner.
Some VIPs’ willingness to part with their tokens right after the dinner snapshot may lend credence to the argument from lawmakers and other critics that their investments were purely a “pay-for-play” tactic to get close to the president.
Fears of foreign influence and crypto corruption as a result of the dinner led to protests at the event, plus the introduction of a bill that would keep the president from profiting from crypto ventures.
Even before the event, Democratic Senators sought an ethics probe over the dinner, citing “severe risk that President Trump and other officials may be engaging in ‘pay-to-play’ corruption by selling presidential access.”
TRUMP is down more than 14% in the last 24 hours to $13.22, nearly 82% off its January all-time high.
Edited by Andrew Hayward
Daily Debrief Newsletter
Start every day with the top news stories right now, plus original features, a podcast, videos and more.