Three weeks after the launch of the official Meme Coin, over 700 unauthorized cryptocurrency tokens have been sent to Donald Trump's digital wallet.
According to an analysis by the Financial Times, the fleet of copycat coins urged a warning about the fraudulent investors.
The surge begins within 30 minutes of the announcement of Trump's first token, allowing creators to utilize the Solana (SOL) blockchain feature to put quest-free deposits into other wallets.
Hundreds of these tokens use names connected to Trump or his family, including “official Trump” and “official Melania.”
Actual Trump meme coins shown in the chart below have fallen by 24.6% over the past seven days.
The analysis found 167 Trump family-themed copycat coins, with 67 using the word “official” in their names. Unauthorized tokens target Trump children. 30 references Baron, 26 mentions of Ivanka, 10 include Eric's name.
Another 35 tokens are attempting to associate them with Elon Musk, CEO of Trump's ally Tesla.
Eswar Prasad, a senior fellow at the Brookings facility, said Trump's entry into the meme coin “opened the floodgates to deceiving and ramping speculation.”
The investigation revealed suspicious trading patterns. In one case, the account purchased a fake “official playing card” coin for $100,000 and lost the entire holding after 12 seconds.
Many tokens show minimal trading activity. Despite the estimated $6 billion based on the last deal, the “Baron Trump Official” coin has not seen any activity since January 21st. The biggest deal is only $242.
Professor Omid Malekan, an auxiliary professor at Columbia Business School, noted that “information-free investors” faces challenges that distinguish legitimate projects from imitation.
This situation overwhelmed some crypto exchanges. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong admits that it is “no longer possible” to evaluate the roughly 1 million new tokens created each week.
“And regulators need to understand that even at this point it is completely infeasible to apply for each approval (you can't do 1M a week),” Armstrong said. . “We need to move from All Allow List to block lists and take advantage of automated scans such as customer reviews/on-chine data to help our customers sift. And we will continue to integrate native Dex support more deeply. Customers should not need to know if the transaction is happening in DEX or CEX.”
