1 meme coin, 72 hours, 422,071 tweets, and a $10 billion market cap

It all started on Truth Social at 2am UTC on January 18, 2025: Trump posted 'My NEW Official Trump Meme is HERE... GET YOUR $TRUMP NOW.' The first public tweet about $TRUMP was created by TrumpReposter, an account dedicated to reposting Trump's Truth Social content to X. The first tweet mentioning the contract address — used to identify the meme coin — was created by vuthailong_, an account sharing trading signals, noting that '4 smart traders are buying it!' with a market cap of $218.40M. By the time Trump made the same announcement via his X account at 2:44am, the frenzy had already begun. Our analysis covers every publicly available tweet with keyword '$TRUMP' created within the first 72 hours of launch. What happened was a mix of disbelief, confusion, and buying frenzy — a $10 billion market cap in 36 hours, then a spectacular drop the moment Melania launched her competing meme coin $MELANIA.

The narrative evolved in distinct phases. T+0 to T+12 hours: massive hype and excitement as early investors celebrated unprecedented profits. T+12 to T+24: criticism emerged around allegations of heavy centralization and insider manipulation. T+24 to T+36: rapid rise followed by sharp crash, with accusations of a potential rug pull dominating discussions. T+36 to T+48: $MELANIA launched and drained liquidity from $TRUMP, with growing speculation about future Trump-related tokens. T+48 to T+72: the frenzy began to fade, leaving a mix of excitement, skepticism, and debates over the impact on crypto's reputation. To identify influencers, we calculated an 'influence ratio' — total views divided by total posts, which downranks spammers. Top accounts included @realDonaldTrump (influence ratio 111,962,684), @EricTrump (14,639,662), @coffeebreak_YT who exposed tokenomics issues (8,805,961), and @DonaldJTrumpJr (5,682,697). Top 10% of users generated 93% of all view counts — an outcome similar to the Pareto principle.

With AI-assisted geo-location analysis, we found the United States, India, and UAE as the top three countries by weighted exposure, followed by the UK, China, and Japan. Notably, crypto is banned in China yet many Chinese accounts were enthusiastic about $TRUMP — Chinese is the second most-viewed language in our dataset. Nigeria also appeared in the top 10, reflecting how cryptocurrency serves as a hedge against a national currency that has fallen from 100 naira per USD in 2000 to 1,509 naira per USD in 2025. Sentiment analysis using large language models revealed that positive sentiment was correlated with higher price — reaching its peak shortly before the price peak, meaning the crowd became less positive before the top was in. Negative sentiment peaked simultaneously with the price drop after $MELANIA's launch. Regression analysis confirmed: for every additional view on a positive tweet, price slightly increases, but negative tweets have a stronger depressing effect on price. Price of the previous hour is the strongest predictor of current price, reflecting a trend-following dynamic.

“At 2am UTC on January 18, 2025, Trump posted about $TRUMP on Truth Social. Within 72 hours, 422,071 tweets and a $10 bil…”

Our analysis sheds light on what happened on social media during the $TRUMP trading frenzy, though with important limitations. We only used publicly available data from X — platforms like Telegram that meme coin traders frequently use were excluded. We did not use on-chain transaction data, which is critical for robust trading algorithms. And $TRUMP is an outlier: many meme coins have a very short life within one hour of active trading. Nevertheless, since 2025 we are experiencing more 'black swan events' in crypto — the Libra meme coin scandal linked to Argentine President Javier Milei, the $15 billion Bybit hack, and now $TRUMP. Whether this is truly an outlier or the new normal is the question the market is still answering. This research is a repost from the Information Tracer Blog by Zhouhan Chen.