How 1m $TRUMP investors lost $3.8bn, while President Trump pocketed $636M

Nearly a million people who bought President Donald Trump’s $TRUMP memecoin have collectively lost $3.81 billion, according to new blockchain analysis. The data has once again reignited scrutiny over a sitting head of state profiting from a token bearing his name.

The findings, compiled by blockchain analytics firm Nansen and first reported by The New York Times, examined every wallet that has purchased $TRUMP since its launch on the Solana blockchain in January 2025. Of roughly 1.48 million wallets tracked, 988,905, about two-thirds, are sitting on losses. 

The remaining third, mostly early buyers who got in during the coin’s first hours before it rocketed toward its peak, are collectively up $4.04 billion, meaning the market as a whole is nearly break-even. But the split tells a familiar memecoin story: a small cohort of early movers captured the gains, while the retail majority bought in later and higher, only to get burnt.

$TRUMP was trading at $1.69 as of Sunday, down nearly 98% from its all-time high of $75.35, reached within 48 hours of launch. Trump unveiled the token three days before his January 2025 inauguration, promoting it on Truth Social with the line “GET YOUR $TRUMP NOW!” and framing it as a celebration of his political movement.

Trump profits $1.4 billion from crypto investments in 2025 – $636 million from $TRUMP,

The president’s own financial disclosure, released by the Office of Government Ethics on June 30, shows he personally benefited from the coin’s volatility. Trump collected $636 million in royalties from $TRUMP, structured as payments to CIC Digital LLC, a Trump Organisation affiliate. That figure accounts for nearly half of the $1.4 billion he made from crypto-related ventures in 2025 alone, with the broader haul, including World Liberty Financial, reportedly totalling around $2.2 billion.

Of the one billion $TRUMP tokens ever created, roughly 80% are held by two Trump-linked entities, which are releasing the supply on a three-year unlock schedule. 

World Liberty Financial, the separate crypto venture Trump co-founded with his sons, hasn’t fared much better for its retail buyers: its $WLFI token has lost more than 80% of its value. leaving 85% of tracked secondary-market wallets underwater on a combined $83 million in losses.

The losses land against a regulatory backdrop that the president has actively reshaped. Since Trump took office, the Securities and Exchange Commission has said it will not treat memecoins as securities and has dropped or paused close to 60% of its pending crypto enforcement cases, including long-running actions against major exchanges. 

Trump signed the GENIUS Act into law in mid-2025, establishing the first federal framework for stablecoins, but the law is silent on memecoins or on tokens issued by elected officials, a gap critics say allowed his coin to launch without meaningful oversight. Europe’s MiCA framework, by contrast, requires consumer disclosures for any publicly sold crypto asset regardless of how it’s labelled.

Senator Kirsten Gillibrand has proposed legislation barring elected officials and their spouses from issuing or promoting crypto tokens, having previously pushed similar language during GENIUS Act negotiations before it was stripped from the final bill. The measure faces significant challenges in a Congress that has largely embraced the industry.

The White House has rejected suggestions that the president is profiting off his supporters. “President Trump proudly made the United States the crypto capital of the world,” spokeswoman Anna Kelly told the Times, adding that “all actions by President Trump and his administration are taken in the best interest of the American people.”

For ordinary buyers, the arithmetic is harder to spin. One investor who told the Times he backed Trump in 2024 said he put roughly $500,000 into the token and has since lost about half of it. “It is kind of incredible,” he said. “It is almost a legal scam.”

The Nansen figures suggest the president’s memecoin has cost retail buyers nearly four times as much as was lost to hackers across all of decentralised finance in the first half of 2026, a comparison likely to keep $TRUMP at the centre of Washington’s crypto oversight debate through the rest of the year.