Twenty-two months ago, Donald Trump’s official meme coin was the hottest thing in crypto. It launched on a Friday night before his second inauguration, and by Sunday it was trading above $73 with a paper value north of $14 billion. This week it hit a new all-time low. As UNILAD Tech pointed out, anyone who bought at the top has lost almost everything.
We pulled the current numbers from CoinGecko on Tuesday morning and did the math ourselves. Here’s what a $1,000 bet is worth today, how the coin got here, and who actually came out ahead.
The short version
- $TRUMP peaked at $73.43 on January 19, 2025. On November 10, 2026, it traded at about $1.14, after touching a record low of $1.11 overnight.
- $1,000 invested at the peak bought about 13.6 tokens. Those are now worth roughly $15.50, a loss of about 98.4%.
- The same $1,000 in Bitcoin on the same day would be worth about $735 today. In Dogecoin, about $180.
- Blockchain analytics firm Nansen counted nearly 989,000 wallets sitting on $3.8 billion in losses by mid-2026.
- Trump’s own financial disclosure shows about $636 million in income from the coin’s licensing deal.
The math on $1,000
The numbers are simple, and brutal. At the all-time high of $73.43, $1,000 bought 13.62 $TRUMP tokens. At Tuesday’s price of $1.14, those 13.62 tokens are worth $15.53. You would have lost $984 and change.
Even a buyer who got in on launch weekend, before the spike, is underwater. Reuters reported the token trading at “less than $10” on Saturday morning, January 18, 2025. Buy $1,000 at $10 and you’d be holding about $114 today.
For context, the token’s total market value has fallen from about $11.7 billion on inauguration day, as reported by Reuters at the time, to roughly $321 million now.
How it got from $73 to $1
The coin was announced on January 17, 2025, through Trump’s social accounts. Eighty percent of the one billion token supply was set aside for two Trump-linked companies, CIC Digital LLC and Fight Fight Fight LLC, to be unlocked gradually over three years. Only 20% hit the market at launch, and that scarcity is a big part of why the price went vertical so fast.
It didn’t last. Within weeks the price had dropped into the teens, then into single digits. A few moments since then stand out:
- April 2025: The project announced a private dinner with the president for the top 220 holders. The price jumped from about $9 to over $14 in a day.
- May 22, 2025: The dinner happened at Trump’s golf club in Sterling, Virginia. The price peaked near $15.70 around the event, then slid as some attendees sold.
- July 18, 2025: The first big unlock released 90 million tokens from the insider allocation. More supply, same demand.
- January 2026: At its first birthday, $TRUMP traded around $5, down about 93%.
- November 4, 2026: The morning after the midterms, it fell 17% to $1.33. It has kept sliding since.
The midterm hit came alongside a broader selloff. On November 5, the S&P 500 dropped 4.36% and the Nasdaq fell 5.52%, wiping out close to $3 trillion in value, with chip and AI stocks taking the worst of it. We broke down what that day did to one of the biggest names in our piece on what $1,000 in Nvidia at its peak is worth now. Trump-linked crypto had a worse week than almost anything: World Liberty Financial’s WLFI token and the $MELANIA coin also printed record lows.
Compared with “real” crypto
Crypto as a whole hasn’t had a great run since January 2025 either. But the gap between a meme coin and the big assets is the whole story.
Bitcoin is down about a quarter from where it sat on inauguration weekend. Dogecoin, the original meme coin, has lost about 82%. $TRUMP lost 98%. If you’re wondering how crypto losses can get even uglier, the Binance hack that drained $6.3 billion in 20 minutes is a reminder that price isn’t the only risk.
Who made money, and who didn’t
The “500 people became millionaires overnight” line that went viral in January 2025 came from trader screenshots and social posts. It was never independently verified. What has been measured tells a lopsided story.
| Who | What they got | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Trump (via CIC Digital) | About $636 million in licensing income | 2026 financial disclosure |
| Creator-linked wallets | $324M+ in trading fees by May 2025 | Chainalysis via NBC News |
| 58 biggest winners | More than $10M each, about $1.1B combined | Chainalysis via NBC News |
| Wallets in profit | Under 500,000 wallets, about $4B in gains | Nansen, June 2026 |
| Wallets in the red | 988,905 wallets, $3.81B in losses | Nansen, June 2026 |
Two caveats matter here. The $636 million is revenue reported on a disclosure form, not audited profit. And Nansen’s $3.8 billion includes unrealized losses, meaning people who still hold the token and haven’t sold. Both figures were measured months ago, when $TRUMP was worth more than double today’s price, so the real loss is likely bigger now.
The pattern is familiar from every meme coin cycle: the people closest to the launch and the fastest traders make money from fees and early exits, and a long tail of latecomers holds the bag.
What happens next
The project isn’t slowing down. A third dinner is planned for November 22 for the top 185 holders, with a VIP reception for the top 29. Holder rankings lock with a snapshot on November 12. Earlier dinners briefly lifted the price, so watch for a bump this week.
Political pressure is building too. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, the top Democrat on the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, sent a letter on November 5 to Bill Zanker of Fight Fight Fight LLC, asking for records on the coin, foreign attendees at the dinners and conflict-of-interest policies. Responses are due January 4, 2027. Right now it’s a minority-led inquiry with no subpoena power. That changes if Blumenthal takes the gavel when Democrats control the Senate in January.
Don’t expect the SEC to step in. In 2025, the agency’s staff said most meme coins don’t count as securities, which leaves buyers with few of the protections that come with stocks.
If you’re still holding $TRUMP
Selling at a loss can offset capital gains on your US tax return, and up to $3,000 a year can offset ordinary income. Keep your purchase records, and check with a tax professional before you decide. This isn’t investment advice, and nobody can tell you where a meme coin goes next.
The bottom line: $TRUMP did make some people very rich. Most of them got in early, sold early, or collected fees. For a typical buyer who jumped in when the headlines were loudest, $1,000 has turned into about the price of a sandwich.
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