Nearly a million investors lost a total of $4.9 billion on Trump crypto coin

By Eric Lipton and David Yaffe-Bellany

WASHINGTON – An up-to-date tally of Trump followers turned crypto investors is in. And for them, the overall results are remarkably bad.

Nearly one million people who bought President Donald Trump’s meme coin have lost money through the end of June, according to a report by cryptocurrency analytics firm Nansen.

Their losses total US$3.81 billion (S$4.9 billion).

The analytics firm’s assessment was calculated this past week after Trump signed an annual financial disclosure showing that he walked away with a US$636 million payout on the same crypto bet.

The odds were always in his favour. Trump profited whether the price of his meme coin went up or down. He collected returns whenever anyone traded the tokens, as he repeatedly pushed his followers to do, using his Truth Social account to promote the coin.

Once a crypto sceptic, Trump embraced the profit-making opportunity of digital currencies in 2024, while he was running for president. He and his sons founded a crypto startup called World Liberty Financial, which soon began selling a coin called $WLFI that has also declined sharply.

Three days before his inauguration, Trump unveiled a second Trump-branded investment – the $TRUMP meme coin, a type of novelty currency with little practical value.

Most crypto transactions are publicly visible. That allows analysts to trace purchases of digital coins from individual crypto accounts, known as wallets. Nansen’s data shows that, as of the end of June, 988,905 buyers of the $TRUMP meme coin have lost money, representing roughly two out of every three buyers.

Cumulatively, these 988,905 wallets have lost a total of US$3.81 billion, including buyers who have held on to their stash and recorded paper losses, according to Nansen. The coin was trading at US$1.76 as of July 3, down 97 per cent from its peak price of US$75.35.

Trump was not the only winner on the $TRUMP coin. After it launched, its price surged from less than US$1 to more than US$70, creating a window of opportunity for sophisticated crypto traders to extract a big profit.

A little under 500,000 crypto wallets have recorded profits from $TRUMP, totalling US$4 billion, according to Nansen. But that figure “reflects a small number of early buyers capturing enormous gains while the broad retail majority absorbed the losses,” the report said.

Today, World Liberty’s coin trades at US$0.057, down 82 per cent since September.

• This article originally appeared in The New York Times.