Who are the primary "beneficiaries" and potential "manipulators" behind Trump's epic currency issuance?
The partners selected by Trump for cryptocurrency issuance are worth long-term attention.Author: flowie, ChainCatcher
Although Trump stated that he "doesn't know much" about the meme coin named after him, TRUMP, the entire crypto layout of the Trump family undoubtedly has a strong "operator" behind it.
The seemingly casual launch of the TRUMP coin is actually the result of clear prior collaborations with multiple projects such as Moonshot and Jupiter/Meteora, which are the biggest beneficiaries behind Trump's epic coin issuance, aside from Solana.
For example, Moonshot, which supports fiat purchases of memes, quickly added 400,000 users, becoming a strong new challenger in the CEX space. Meteora, from the same team as Jupiter, is the fastest-growing project in the Solana ecosystem benefiting from this Trump coin issuance… As a carefully selected partner of Trump, they are worth long-term attention.
Key Supporters/Beneficiaries of Trump's Coin Issuance
Moonshot ------ Added 400,000 users, CEX Challenger
After the issuance of Trump's coin (TRUMP), Moonshot, as the official purchasing channel recommended by Trump, added over 400,000 new users within 24 hours, processing nearly $400 million in transaction volume. Due to the trading frenzy of the TRUMP token, Moonshot briefly rose to the top of the free finance apps on the US Apple App Store, surpassing Coinbase, PayPal, and Robinhood.
According to statistics from @sliceanalytics on Dune, Moonshot added 187,400 new on-chain users solely through TRUMP, while the previously popular TikTok meme Chillguy only brought in over 7,200 new users.
Currently, the cumulative trading volume of TRUMP on Moonshot has also reached nearly $750 million.
After the issuance of Trump's coin, Robinhood also collaborated with Moonshot, allowing over 20 million users on Robinhood to seamlessly deposit into Moonshot, opening up more traffic for Moonshot.
Moonshot is not a meme launch platform launched by DEXScreener, but rather comes from the same lineage as Pump.fun, both incubated by Alliance DAO.
Shortly after its launch in July last year, Moonshot was recommended by meme super promoter Murad. Its feature is supporting fiat deposits for memes. Users can quickly fund their accounts through common payment methods like Apple Pay, credit cards, and PayPal, without the need to manage complex blockchain wallets or pay gas fees.
Moonshot has gathered a large number of popular meme coins, including many tokens that have not yet launched on secondary or top exchanges.
Around October last year, Moonshot truly gained popularity due to the "listing effect" presented by the early listings of major tokens like MOODENG, SPX6900, Chillguy, and GOAT, earning it the title of the Binance of the meme world, a small Binance on-chain.
With the rapid launch of the $30 billion presidential meme TRUMP, it is expected to become the best showcase of Moonshot's "listing effect," and the subsequent listing effects and carefully selected tokens on the platform are worth continuous attention.
Moonshot allows a massive number of users to participate directly, bypassing CEX, which poses a significant threat to CEX.
Currently, Moonshot has not disclosed any coin issuance plans.
Jupiter/Meteora------ Shaking Up the Solana DeFi Landscape
Jupiter, as the largest DEX aggregator on Solana, is a well-known star project in the crypto community. Many users may not be familiar with Meteora, the liquidity platform for stable assets on Solana. In fact, Meteora and Jupiter share the same founding team; the Jupiter team established Meteora before founding Jupiter.
Originally named Mercurial Finance, Meteora issued the token MER in 2022, but due to the fallout from the FTX incident, it rebranded to Meteora and abandoned the MER token. The new token MET that Meteora originally planned to issue has also not been released.
Jupiter and Meteora provided LFG tech stack and liquidity support for Trump's coin issuance.
After the issuance of Trump's coin, Jupiter mentioned on the X platform that the issuance of TRUMP used the same LFG tech stack as JUP, including DLMM pools, ILM design, and tight integration with Jupiter.
Jupiter stated that close cooperation with the Meteora team ensured the smooth issuance of TRUMP, not only on Jupiter but throughout the entire ecosystem using the Jupiter API (including applications like Moonshot).
On Meteora, it can be seen that the TRUMP team injected 10% of the initial liquidity into the TRUMP/USDC trading pair through Meteora, utilizing the DLMM mechanism to smoothly sell over $500 million worth of tokens to the market.
Both Jupiter and Meteora benefited greatly from this epic collaboration with Trump's coin issuance, especially the previously lesser-known Meteora.
On the day of Trump's coin issuance (January 18), Jupiter's daily trading volume surged to $16.8 billion, setting a historical record of $20.6 billion the next day, more than three times its usual daily trading volume of around $6 billion.
Meteora's growth was even more dramatic, with trading volumes breaking new highs of $3.99 billion, $6.1 billion, and $4.7 billion from January 18 to January 20, approximately 8-10 times its usual trading volume of $500-600 million.
Meteora also became one of the most profitable protocols in the Trump effect. According to monitoring by @ai_9684xtpa, about 5 hours after the issuance of Trump's coin, the mainstream liquidity pool protocol income of TRUMP on Meteora ranked second across the network in the past 24 hours, second only to Tether, with LP income reaching $12.2 million. If estimated based on average hourly fee income, it could reach as high as $58.08 million in 24 hours.
On January 21, according to DefiLlama data, Meteora's fees reached $111.93 million within 24 hours, surpassing Solana to rank first.
Meteora also ate into Raydium's market share, shaking up the DeFi landscape on Solana. According to Blockwork data, Raydium was previously the largest meme trading revenue generator on Solana, with a market share of around 90%. After the issuance of the TRUMP token, it dropped to 30%, while Meteora's share of meme coin trading on Solana rose from less than 10% to 60%.
Recommended reading: “Trump's Coin Issuance Shakes Up the Solana DeFi Landscape: Meteora's Daily Trading Volume Soars 8 Times, Raydium's Market Share Drops Below 30%”
Wintermute------ Market Making Project as a Trendsetter
Wintermute quickly supported OTC trading of the TRUMP token after its issuance and further announced support for trading TRUMP tokens via API, providing streaming and RFQ pricing.
Previously, on-chain analysis indicated that the largest holding address of TRUMP was suspected to be Wintermute, which may have previously collaborated to provide market-making services for the TRUMP token.
With the recent popularity of meme and AI agents, Wintermute's market-making projects, holdings, and trading dynamics have become a trend indicator for many players.
At the end of November, according to analysis by @ai_9684xtpa, 64% of the top 25 meme coins that Wintermute was market-making for had been listed on Binance, with 6 tokens listed simultaneously on both spot and perpetual contracts.
Crypto KOL @NFTbigbanana also analyzed Wintermute's market-making path, where a clear signal came from official Twitter, indicating that before market-making, @wintermute_t might have interacted with or followed relevant meme Twitter accounts, or made small token transfers to Wintermute's wallet; then there was accumulation and wash trading, with the characteristic of long wash trading (6 months+) but not significant pullbacks; finally, a large price increase.
Players can observe Wintermute's trading movements and associated addresses through wallet addresses marked on platforms like arkm.
Other Meme Infrastructure in the Solana Ecosystem
In addition to Moonshot, Jupiter/Meteora, and Wintermute as the supporting teams behind Trump's coin issuance, other meme infrastructures in the Solana ecosystem have also benefited from the influx of traffic. DefiLlama data shows that the TVL of Solana ecosystem projects has generally risen in the past 7 days.
In the past 7 days, more than half of the projects that entered the top 20 in revenue came from the Solana ecosystem. Besides Solana, the main tools for meme trading and trading bots, as well as DEXs, ranked by revenue from high to low are: Photon, Pump, Moonshot, MEVX, Phantom, BullX, BONKbot, Raydium, Trojan, DEX Screener, GMGN.
Why Are Polychain and Justin Sun Rumored to Be the Leaders Behind Trump's Coin Issuance?
It is currently difficult to definitively identify the exact operators behind Trump's coin issuance. However, various key team members of past crypto projects by the Trump family, especially those involved in WLFI, as well as pro-crypto officials in Trump's new government, have participated to some extent.
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 crypto backgrounds of these five co-founders are not very deep, though they have some connections to crypto. Chase Herro has been involved in businesses such as cannabis sales and weight loss products, with a complex background, and previously collaborated with Zak Folkman on the DeFi project Dough Finance. Zak Folkman also runs a service called "Date Hotter Girls," teaching how to flirt with women, which is also somewhat controversial.
Steven Witkoff is a real estate developer and a friend of Trump, donating $2 million to Trump's campaign and being appointed as a Middle East envoy. Zach Witkoff and Alex Witkoff are both sons of Steven Witkoff.
The other five specific business leaders and advisory members of WLFI are closely related to crypto.
Corey Caplan, the technical strategy leader of WLFI, is a co-founder of the DeFi project Dolomite.
WLFI's chief developer Bogdan Purnavel and blockchain head Octavian Lojnita both previously worked at Dough Finance in development-related roles. Coindesk also reported that WLFI allegedly obtained code directly from Dough Finance in its early stages.
Rich Teo, the head of stablecoins and payments, is the CEO of Paxos Asia.
Among the advisory team, Sandy Peng is a co-founder of the Ethereum Layer 2 blockchain Scroll, Luke Pearson is a general partner at Polychain Capital, and Alexei Dulub is the founder of Web3 Antivirus and PixelPlex.
It is worth mentioning that **Scroll among the advisory team is also one of the Layer 2 projects led by Polychain. Additionally, the prediction platform **Polymarket, which Trump has frequently retweeted this year, is also a project led by Polychain.
As a leading VC in the US, Polychain has significant connections with Trump and WLFI, and it has been speculated to be the most critical guide behind Trump's crypto layout.
Justin Sun has also sparked market speculation as a key guide behind Trump's coin issuance due to his close interactions with Trump's crypto project WLFI and meme coins before and after the issuance.
Looking at Justin Sun's recent actions related to Trump, on November 24, 2024, he invested $30 million in WLFI and became an investment advisor for the project.
On January 19, 2025, Justin Sun invested another $45 million, accumulating a total investment of $75 million.
On the day of the TRUMP coin issuance, January 18, Justin Sun quickly facilitated its listing on the HTX platform, with Huobi's platform seeing over 100,000 new registered users in a single day, also gaining significant traffic benefits. Subsequently, starting January 20, WLFI made two additional purchases of TRX, totaling over $7 million in value. In the future, WLFI tokens will also be issued on the Tron network and will be listed on HTX immediately.
In addition to WLFI and other projects related to Trump's crypto initiatives, some key pro-crypto officials in the Trump administration, such as Vice President Vance, SEC Chairman Paul Atkins, and White House AI and cryptocurrency affairs director David Sacks, may also be involved.
David Sacks has previously revealed that he holds Sol, being a long-term supporter of Solana. The choice of Solana for Trump's coin issuance may also have been influenced by David Sacks.
