The Trump family is at it again! The "First Lady Coin" MELANIA briefly surpassed a market value of 10 billion, with several token details sparking market controversy
"First Lady" Melania launched her official token MELANIA, which at one point saw its market value soar to over $13 billion. This influx of funds has caused significant losses in the cryptocurrency market, but several details about the tokens have also sparked controversy in the market.Author: Nancy, PANews
Following the unprecedented excitement sparked by Trump personally launching the MEME coin TRUMP, his wife Melania has also introduced her own official token, MELANIA. Under the "First Lady" effect combined with the FOMO sentiment surrounding the TRUMP token, MELANIA's market capitalization was briefly pushed above $13 billion, causing congestion and even outages on the Solana network due to the surge in trading volume. However, this funding frenzy driven by FOMO has also led to significant bloodletting in the crypto market, with several details surrounding the issuance of MELANIA raising market controversies.
In the early hours of January 20, Melania Trump announced on social media that people can now purchase the MEME coin MELANIA. Subsequently, Trump retweeted to further confirm this information, quickly igniting the market.
TRUMP falls sharply, crypto market suffers severe bloodletting
Stimulated by the wealth effect brought by Trump's token TRUMP, MELANIA quickly captured a large amount of market liquidity within just a few hours. According to DEX Screener data, MELANIA's market cap reached over $13.09 billion just hours after its launch, with a cumulative trading volume exceeding $1.36 billion.
Under the bloodletting attack of MELANIA, the crypto market generally declined as funds were rapidly withdrawn, with particularly severe bloodletting on-chain, and TRUMP was no exception, briefly falling below $40.
According to SoSoValue data, the crypto market sector generally retraced, with the AI Agents sector down by 12.08%, the PayFi sector down by 6.75%, the DeFi sector down by 6.94%, and the MEME sector down by 7.53%.
Coinglass data shows that in the past 12 hours, over $710 million in contracts across the crypto market were liquidated, with long positions liquidating $590 million and short positions liquidating $120 million. The cryptocurrencies with the highest liquidation amounts were Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, and TRUMP. GMGN data indicated that TRUMP's maximum drop today reached 59.6%.
Token issuance website created in a hurry yesterday, MELANIA's initial lock-up period only 30 days
While MELANIA was being speculated upon by the market, the original intention of its token creation, unlocking mechanism, and the Trump family's consecutive token issuance actions have also sparked considerable speculation and controversy.
On one hand, MELANIA's deployment time has been criticized as being too rushed. According to Abstract contributor cygaar, MELANIA's official website and domain were created just yesterday (January 19), and the front-end code is incomplete. In contrast, the deployment work for TRUMP's token began preparations as early as December 2024;
On the other hand, according to information from MELANIA's official website, the token distribution plan allocates 35% to team shares, 20% to the treasury, 20% to the community, 15% to public issuance, and 10% to liquidity. There are significant differences in the unlocking mechanisms between MELANIA and TRUMP; the MELANIA team's token share has an initial lock-up period of only 30 days, while TRUMP's team share requires a lock-up of 3 years. Meanwhile, on-chain analyst Yu Jin pointed out that the figures regarding the team's unlocking portion in MELANIA's token distribution appear to be erroneous. According to the official token distribution, the team allocation is 35%, but the unlocking rules indicate it is calculated at 30%. Furthermore, only 35% of the team's allocation has written unlocking rules, while the rest is not specified, which may imply that MELANIA's circulation could be 65%.
Regarding the Trump family's consecutive token issuance actions, Coinage founder Zack Guzmán analyzed in a post that the Trump family quickly launched the TRUMP and MELANIA coins before the inauguration to potentially avoid constitutional risks. According to the U.S. Constitution's compensation clause, the president cannot receive private benefits from foreign governments. Trump previously earned about $7.2 million from an NFT project, and his wife Melania also made over $330,000 from NFT sales. Issuing tokens before officially taking office could reduce the risk of being accused of violating the compensation clause.
Ryan Selkis, founder of Messari, publicly called on Trump regarding the launch of MELANIA, suggesting he dismiss the personnel who recommended initiating the Melania project today, pointing out the following issues: the project team lacks professional capability; it could cause significant economic losses and damage to reputation; project decisions did not adequately consider Trump's interests.
"Meme coins are a zero-sum lottery game. They do not create wealth. Every buy order simply matches with a sell order. After the initial surge, prices will eventually plummet, and the last investors will lose everything. If the platform also takes a cut, it effectively becomes a negative-sum game. If you want to gamble moderately for entertainment, that's fine. If you're a professional trader, that's also fine. But most people should buy long-term value-preserving assets," suggested former Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan.
Solana network overwhelmed, facing a massive stress test
Of course, this frenzy has also brought a massive stress test to the Solana network, with the surge in trading volume leading to abnormal congestion in on-chain transactions, prompting investors to raise Gas fees to seize trading opportunities, even forcing major exchanges to suspend Solana network withdrawals.
"All of our systems are currently under extreme load, and the team is working hard to restore normal service as soon as possible," DEX Jupiter stated. Solana wallet Phantom also revealed on social media that the wallet's request volume has surged to over 8 million requests per minute. During the effort to stabilize the platform, transactions may not complete successfully on the first attempt.
Buffalu, co-founder of Jito Labs, also stated that due to unprecedented load levels, Jito Labs' block engine API is experiencing severe service degradation. Although the Solana network continues to operate and process blocks, transactions submitted through Jito Labs services are affected. The engineering team has been working for several hours to fix the issues and will provide updates once full service is restored. According to Tom Wan, a strategy analyst at 21.co, Jito validators' daily tip income reached $23 million, setting a new historical high, even higher than when TRUMP was launched.
