A wallet used by the creators of President Donald Trump’s Solana meme coin made its first-ever withdrawals on Tuesday, sending $4.6 million worth of the project’s liquidity to a Coinbase Prime account.
The move comes just days ahead of the project’s first major token unlock, which is set for Thursday. Upon the three-month anniversary of the coin’s surprise launch on the eve of the president’s inauguration, 40 million TRUMP tokens are scheduled to be released into circulation.
At writing, that sum is worth about $309 million. At the TRUMP token’s peak price, shortly after launch, it would have been worth some $2.9 billion.
It’s as yet unclear why the coin’s team opted to withdraw $4.6 million from the project this week, or whether that timing is correlated with the looming token unlock.
A spokesperson for longtime Trump business partner Bill Zanker, who is listed on documents for an LLC linked to the token project, did not immediately respond to Decrypt’s request for comment on the development.
The $4.6 million in USDC was then bridged from Solana to a wallet on Ethereum, after which the funds were sent to wallets that Arkham Intelligence has labeled as Coinbase Deposit or Coinbase Prime Custody wallets.
The TRUMP token has steadily declined in value since launching on January 17. It’s currently down 89% from its all-time high, to $7.73 at writing.
Flooding the market with millions more TRUMP tokens is likely to only depress that price further. After the initial unlock of 40 million tokens, another 760 million tokens will be released steadily on a daily basis after various cliffs, with the full supply of 1 billion tokens circulating by January 2028 per the official roadmap.
Analysts previously told Decrypt this week’s unlock is likely to increase sell pressure on the token—though the coin’s unique user base, including many first-time crypto buyers, may not be as susceptible to typical industry triggers.
A whopping 80% of the project’s ultimate 1 billion token supply is earmarked for the project’s owners and creators, including Trump himself.
Edited by Andrew Hayward