The official meme coin of United States President Donald Trump became one of the biggest crypto phenomena of recent years upon its launch. But a year and a half later, new data reveal just how different the outcome was for the average investor compared to those who entered early, and of course, compared to Trump himself.
According to data from the blockchain analytics firm Nansen, first published in The New York Times, nearly a million wallets that purchased the TRUMP coin recorded cumulative losses of about $3.81 billion by the end of June. Out of approximately 1.48 million wallets that purchased the coin since its launch in January 2025, no fewer than 988,905 are at a loss.
In simple terms, roughly two out of every three wallets that bought Trump's coin lost money on it. The calculation includes both losses already actually realized and "paper losses" of investors who still hold the coin at a price lower than that at which they purchased it.
<br>From a price of less than a dollar to a peak of $75, and then a crash
To understand how losses of this magnitude were generated, one must return to the initial launch days of the coin. TRUMP was launched in January 2025 and became an almost immediate global phenomenon. Early investors managed to purchase it at a price of less than a dollar, and within just two days, its price surged toward $75.
The meteoric rise attracted masses of new investors to the market, many of them after the coin had already recorded a surge of thousands of percent, but since then the picture has reversed.
As of the writing of these words this week, TRUMP is trading at around just $1.73, a drop of about 97% from the peak recorded shortly after the launch. The market cap of the coin, which at its peak approached $15 billion, has shrunk to only about $411 million. And as often happens with meme coins, timing was almost everything.
Fewer than half a million wallets profited, but they profited big
Alongside the nearly one million losing wallets, the data also reveal a smaller group that emerged from the story with massive profits. According to Nansen, about 492,000 wallets are at a cumulative profit of approximately $4.04 billion.
The profits were concentrated mainly among those who purchased the coin in the first hours of its launch, when its price was still lower than a dollar, before the crowds entered and the value surged.
When combining all the profits and losses of the 1.48 million wallets examined, an even more surprising picture emerges. The cumulative net profit of all purchasers stands at only about $236 million.
That is to say, despite the billions of dollars that changed hands, the meteoric rises and the stories about the newly rich, all investors as a group profited an amount significantly smaller than that which the coin generated for Trump himself.
Trump brought in $636 million
And here lies perhaps the most interesting figure in the story: Just last week, Trump's annual revenue report was revealed, a 927–page document submitted to the US Office of Government Ethics.
According to the report, Trump reported about $636 million in revenues related to the meme coin, mainly through royalties and licensing agreements that passed through CIC Digital. For comparison, the cumulative net profit of all 1.48 million wallets examined by Nansen stands at only about $236 million.
In other words, according to the published data, the activity around the coin brought in for Trump nearly three times the cumulative net profit of all examined purchasers combined, and this is even before looking at the broader picture.
WLFI also deep in the red
Nansen also examined WLFI, the governance token of World Liberty Financial, the "decentralized" finance project identified with the Trump family.
Out of 26,663 wallets that purchased the coin on the secondary market and which the company managed to track, about 85% are at a loss. The cumulative losses of those wallets stand at about $83 million, compared to only about $23 million in profits.
Here too, the price tells the story. WLFI traded over the weekend at around $0.056, a drop of more than 80% since it opened for trading on the secondary market last September.
However, it is important to qualify that the data do not include more than 241,000 wallets that purchased WLFI directly in the initial token sales, nor do they manage to capture the full activity taking place inside centralized exchanges. That is to say, the full picture may be even broader.
The new data come at a particularly sensitive timing as the US Congress continues to debate the CLARITY Act, which aims to regulate the structure of the crypto market in the United States and define the authorities of regulators more clearly.
Concurrently, Democratic lawmakers are pushing to add ethics clauses to the legislation that would restrict the ability of elected officials and their family members to issue, promote or profit from digital currencies.