Trump's carefully selected partners for issuing currency are worthy of long-term attention.

Author: flowie, ChainCatcher

Although Trump said he "didn't know much" about his eponymous meme coin TRUMP, the Trump family's entire crypto layout undoubtedly has a powerful "operator".

Behind the seemingly casual launch of the TRUMP coin, it has actually reached cooperation in advance with multiple project parties such as Moonshot, Jupiter/Meteora, etc. They are the biggest beneficiaries behind Trump's epic coin issuance besides Solana.

For example, Moonshot, which supports the purchase of memes with fiat currency, has quickly added 400,000 users, becoming a strong new challenger to CEX. Meteora, which is from the same team as Jupiter, is the fastest growing project in the Solana ecosystem during Trump’s coin issuance bonus… As Trump’s carefully selected partners, they deserve long-term attention.

Trump’s primary supporter/beneficiary of coin issuance

Moonshot — 400,000 new users, a CEX challenger

After Trump issued the coin (TRUMP), Moonshot, as the official purchase channel recommended by Trump, added more than 400,000 new users within 24 hours and processed nearly $400 million in transactions. Due to the trading boom of TRUMP tokens, Moonshot once jumped to the top of the free financial apps on the US Apple App Store, surpassing Coinbase, PayPal and Robinhood.

According to @sliceanalytics statistics on Dune, Moonshot added 187,400 new on-chain users through TRUMP alone, while the previously popular Tiktok concept meme Chillguy only brought it more than 7,200 new users.

Currently, TRUMP’s cumulative trading volume in Moonshot has reached nearly US$750 million.

After Trump issued the coin, Robinhood also started cooperation with Moonshot, and more than 20 million users on Robinhood were able to deposit money to Moonshot seamlessly, opening up more traffic for Moonshot.

Moonshot is not a meme launch platform launched by DEXScreener, but a platform from the same school as Pump.fun, both of which were incubated by Alliance DAO.

Soon after it was launched in July last year, Moonshot was recommended by Murad, the meme super-caller. Its feature is that it supports fiat currency to recharge memes. Users can quickly recharge funds through common payment methods such as Apple Pay, credit cards, PayPal, etc., without having to manage complex blockchain wallets or pay gas fees.

Moonshot brings together a large number of popular meme coins, including many tokens that have not yet been listed on second-tier or top exchanges.

Around October last year, Moonshot officially became popular because of the "currency listing effect" of several big golden dogs, including MOODENG, SPX6900, Chillguy, and GOAT, and was hailed as the Binance of the meme world and the small Binance on the chain.

Because fiat currency can be deposited quickly, Moonshot is more likely to attract users outside the circle. MOODENG and Chillguy are both concept coins on TikTok.

The presidential meme TRUMP, which quickly passed $30 billion, is expected to become the best sign of Moonshot's "listing effect". From then on, the platform's listing effect and carefully selected tokens will deserve continued attention.

Moonshot allows a large number of users to participate directly without going through CEX, which also poses a considerable threat to CEX.

Moonshot has not yet disclosed its coin issuance plan.

Jupiter/Meteora — Shaking up the Solana DeFi Landscape

As the largest DEX aggregator on Solana, Jupiter is a star project that the crypto community is familiar with. However, many users may not be familiar with Meteora, a liquidity platform for stable assets on Solana. In fact, Meteora and Jupiter are founded by the same team, and Jupiter was founded after the Jupiter team founded Meteora.

Meteora was originally named Mercurial Finance and issued the MER token in 2022. However, due to the impact of the FTX incident, the brand was renamed Meteora and the MER token was abandoned. The new token MET that Meteora originally planned to issue has also not been issued.

Jupiter and Meteora provided LFG technology stack and liquidity support for Trump's coin issuance respectively.

After Trump issued the coin, Jupiter published an article on the X platform, saying that the issuance of TRUMP used the same LFG technology stack as JUP, including the DLMM pool, ILM design and tight Jupiter integration.

Jupiter said that close collaboration with the Meteora team ensured a smooth launch of TRUMP, not only on Jupiter, but also across the entire ecosystem that uses the Jupiter API (including applications like Moonshot).

On Meteora, we can see that the TRUMP team injected 10% of the initial liquidity into the TRUMP/USDC trading pair through Meteora, and used the DLMM mechanism to smoothly sell more than 500 million US dollars of tokens to the market.

Both Jupiter and Meteora have benefited greatly from this epic coin issuance cooperation with Trump, especially the previously unknown Meteora.

On the day Trump issued the currency (January 18), Jupiter's daily trading volume surged to US$16.8 billion, and set a historical record of US$20.6 billion the next day, more than three times the usual daily trading volume of around US$6 billion.

Meteora's growth rate was even more exaggerated. From January 18 to January 20, its trading volume hit new highs of US$3.99 billion, US$6.1 billion, and US$4.7 billion, which is about 8-10 times the usual trading volume of US$500-600 million.

Meteora has also become one of the most profitable protocols in the Trump effect. According to @ai_9684xtpa, about 5 hours after Trump issued the coin, TRUMP's main liquidity pool protocol revenue in Meteora ranked second in the entire network in the past 24 hours, second only to Tether, with LP income reaching 12.2 million US dollars. If estimated based on the average hourly fee income, it will be as high as 58.08 million US dollars in 24 hours.

On January 21, according to DefiLlama data, Meteora's transaction fees reached US$111.93 million in 24 hours, surpassing Solana to rank first.

Meteora also eroded Raydium’s market share, stirring up the DeFi landscape of the Solana ecosystem. According to Blockwork data, Raydium was previously the biggest beneficiary of Solana meme trading, with a market share of around 90%. After the issuance of the TRUMP token, that dropped to 30%, while Meteora’s share of MEME coin trading on Solana rose from less than 10% to 60%.

Recommended reading: (Trump's coin issuance stirs up Solana DeFi landscape: Meteora's daily trading volume soars 8 times, and Raydium's share falls to less than 30% in a short period of time)

Wintermute——Market-making Project Becomes a Trend-Setter

Wintermute quickly supported OTC trading of TRUMP tokens after Trump issued the coin, and further announced support for trading TRUMP tokens through API, and provided Streaming and RFQ pricing.

Earlier, on-chain analysis pointed out that TRUMP’s largest holding address is suspected to be Wintermute, and Wintermute may have previously cooperated to provide market-making services for TRUMP tokens.

Previously, meme and AI agent were very popular, and Wintermute's market-making projects, holdings and trading dynamics also became the weather vane for many players.

At the end of November, according to @ai_9684xtpa’s analysis, 64% of the TOP25 Meme coins made by Wintermute have been listed on Binance, and 6 of them have both spot and perpetual contracts.

Crypto kol @NFTbigbanana has also analyzed the market-making path of wintermute. The more obvious signal comes from the official tweet. Before market making, @wintermute_t may follow or interact with related meme tweets, or transfer small amounts of tokens into the winter wallet; then there is the wash-out and accumulation of funds. The characteristics of the wash-out in winter are that it takes a long time (6 months+) but the retracement is not large; and finally there is a sharp pull-up.

Players can observe the transaction trends and associated addresses of the wintermute wallet address marked on platforms such as arkm.

Solana Ecosystem Other Meme Infrastructure

In addition to Moonshot, Jupiter/Meteora, and Wintermute, who enjoyed great wealth as the support team behind Trump's coin issuance, other meme infrastructures in the Solana ecosystem also took over a lot of traffic. DefiLlama data shows that the TVL of Solana ecosystem projects has generally increased in the past 7 days.

In the past 7 days, more than half of the top 20 projects in terms of revenue are from the Solana ecosystem. In addition to Solana, the main projects are meme trading tool platforms, trading bots, and dex. The order of revenue from high to low is: Photon, Pump, moonshot, MEVX, Phantom, BullX, BONKbot, Raydium, Trojan, DEX Screener, and GMGN.

Trump launches coin, why are Polychain and Justin Sun rumored to be the leaders?

It is difficult to determine the exact operator behind Trump's coin issuance. However, the key team members of the Trump family's various past crypto projects, especially WLFI, and the pro-crypto officials in Trump's new administration are more or less involved.

In addition to Trump and his family members, WLFI's five co-founders are Chase Herro, Zak Folkman, Steven Witkoff, Zach Witkoff and Alex Witkoff.

The five co-founders do not have a deep background in crypto, but they have some connections with crypto. Chase Herro has been engaged in businesses such as marijuana sales and weight loss products, and has a complicated background. He has also worked with Zak Folkman to participate in the DeFi project Dough Finance. Zak Folkman also runs the "Date Hotter Girls" service, which teaches lectures on how to pick up women, and his background is also controversial.

Steven Witkoff is a real estate developer and friend of Trump. He donated $2 million to Trump's campaign and was appointed as the Middle East envoy. Zach Witkoff and Alex Witkoff are both Steven Witkoff's sons.

WLFI's other five specific business leaders and advisory members are closely related to encryption.

Corey Caplan, head of technical strategy at WLFI, is the co-founder of the DeFi project Dolomite.

WLFI’s chief developer Bogdan Purnavel and blockchain director Octavian Lojnita have both worked at Dough Finance as developers and other related personnel. Coindesk also reported that WLFI was suspected of obtaining code directly from Dough Finance in its early stages.

Rich Teo, Head of Stablecoins and Payments, is Paxos CEO for Asia.

Among the advisory team, Sandy Peng is the co-founder of Ethereum's second-layer blockchain Scroll, Luke Pearson is a general partner of Polychain Capital, and Alexei Dulub is the founder of Web3 Antivirus and PixelPlex.

It is worth mentioning that Scroll, which is part of the advisory team, is also one of the L2 projects led by Polychain. In addition, Polymarket, a prediction platform that has been forwarded by Trump many times this year, is also a lead investment project of Polychain.

As a leading VC in the United States, Polychain has close ties with Trump and WLFI. It has also been speculated to be the most critical guide behind Trump's encryption layout.

Sun Yuchen's close interaction with Trump's crypto projects WLFI and meme coin before and after Trump's coin issuance also caused market speculation that he was also the key leader behind Trump's coin issuance.

Looking at Justin Sun’s recent actions related to Trump, on November 24, 2024, Justin Sun invested 30 million US dollars in WLFI and became an investment consultant for the project.

On January 19, 2025, Justin Sun invested another US$45 million, bringing his cumulative investment to US$75 million.

On January 18, the day when TRUMP was issued, Justin Sun quickly pushed it to be launched on the HTX platform. Huobi platform's newly registered users exceeded 100,000 in a single day, and also gained a lot of traffic dividends. Then, starting from January 20, WLF increased its holdings of TRX twice, with a cumulative value of more than 7 million US dollars. In the future, WLFI tokens will also be issued on TRON and listed on HTX as soon as possible.

In addition to Trump crypto-related projects such as WLFI, some key pro-crypto officials in the Trump administration may also be involved, such as Vice President Vance, SEC Chairman Paul Atkins, and White House Director of Artificial Intelligence and Cryptocurrency Affairs David Sacks.

David Sacks once revealed that he holds Sol and is a long-term supporter of Solana. David Sacks may have played a certain role in Trump's first choice of Solana for issuing coins.