Memecoin

Introduction: The Sunday When Illusions Collapsed

Sunday. $TRUMP is trading at $1.69. That is almost 98% below its all-time high of $75.35, reached at the peak of the hype. The numbers that were supposed to make people rich instead left them with empty wallets and the bitter realization that they had become part of one of the biggest financial disasters in crypto history.

Nearly one million people. 988,905 accounts, to be exact. That is roughly two out of every three $TRUMP buyers. Together, they lost a total of $3.8 billion. Not thousands, not millions — billions. With a capital “B.” This was not just a bad investment. It was a mass financial collapse, comparable in scale to pyramid scheme failures or the dot-com crash.

What happened? Trump announced the memecoin three days before his inauguration in January 2025. It was the peak of the hype. Crypto enthusiasts who had seen Dogecoin and Shiba Inu turn ordinary people into millionaires rushed to buy. They believed that Trump’s brand, his political influence, and the buzz around his return to the White House would turn $TRUMP into the next gold mine.

But reality proved brutal. A memecoin is not an investment — it is a bet on hype. And when the hype disappeared, the price collapsed. Those who bought at the peak were left with almost nothing. Those who bought near the bottom also lost money, because the bottom kept moving lower.

Trump, meanwhile, earned $636 million from this memecoin. That is almost half of the $1.4 billion he received from the crypto industry last year. His administration, to put it mildly, was in no rush to regulate the industry. The SEC stated that it would not regulate memecoins as securities and withdrew a number of lawsuits against crypto companies.

Let’s break down...