Trump Meme Coin: Crypto Whale's Early Bet Nets $116M

The identity of a trader who turned a $1 million investment in Solana (SOL) into over $116 million by quickly jumping on President Donald Trump's meme coin launch has been revealed. The trader, known as Naseem, is a pseudonymous crypto investor and hacker with a reputation for token sniping in the Solana community.

Intriguingly, more than two hours before Trump publicly announced his meme coin, Naseem attempted to buy a large amount of the president's token at the correct contract address. This raised questions about potential insider trading, as such early knowledge of a token's legitimacy and launch can allow traders to buy up coins in the project's first seconds and see their value increase as the public invests.

Naseem claimed to have no advance warning from Trump's team but instead discovered on-chain evidence that indicated the president was launching a token with the help of a major Solana decentralized exchange. A researcher from Bubblemaps, an on-chain research firm, confirmed that the Meteora decentralized exchange interacted with a pool designed to exchange TRUMP for USDC a full day before the public announcement.

This interaction implicitly gave a stamp of legitimacy to the official TRUMP token, making it a valuable piece of information hidden among millions of transactions on the Solana network. Bubblemaps found no evidence of other traders noticing and taking advantage of this detail before the public launch.

Naseem's attempt to scoop up TRUMP tokens hours before the president's announcement failed because the liquidity pool was not yet active. This raises questions about whether other insiders would have bought the tokens in droves had the pool been active, and if they were the ones who rushed in to buy tokens within a split-second of the announcement.