Nearly 1 Million Investors Lost $3.8 Billion on Trump's Memecoin as the President Pocketed $636 Million

Nearly a million small investors who bought President Donald Trump's namesake cryptocurrency have lost money on it, according to a new analysis that lays bare how a token marketed to the president's supporters enriched a narrow band of insiders while the crowd absorbed the losses.

The blockchain analytics firm Nansen found that of the 988,905 crypto wallets that purchased the TRUMP memecoin, roughly two-thirds are sitting on realized and unrealized losses totaling about $3.81 billion as of the end of June. A smaller group of roughly 500,000 wallets booked gains of about $4 billion combined — but Nansen said the bulk of those profits flowed to a small cluster of early and professional traders who bought and sold before the price collapsed.

"This reflects a small number of early buyers capturing enormous gains while the broad retail majority absorbed the losses," the Nansen report said. The TRUMP token was recently trading near $1.77, about 97% below its all-time high of roughly $77 reached shortly after its launch in the days before Trump's second inauguration.

The president himself has done well. In a financial disclosure filed last month, Trump reported more than $1.4 billion in income from crypto ventures, including about $636 million tied directly to the TRUMP memecoin. The structure of the token let entities connected to Trump collect a cut of trading fees regardless of whether the price rose or fell — meaning the president earned money on the same frenetic trading that wiped out ordinary buyers.

The findings have sharpened Democratic attacks on what they describe as unprecedented self-dealing from the Oval Office. Critics point to a private gala Trump hosted for the largest holders of the coin, an event the White House characterized as the president's "personal time," as evidence that access was being sold. Ethics lawyers have argued the arrangement blurs the line between a sitting president's official standing and his personal business interests in ways that earlier conflict-of-interest norms were never designed to police.

Trump has brushed off the criticism, insisting he has done "nothing illegal or wrong" and casting himself as a champion of an industry he once dismissed. Supporters note that buying a volatile memecoin is a speculative bet that carries obvious risk, and that no one was forced to participate. But for the hundreds of thousands of retail buyers now holding tokens worth a fraction of what they paid, the numbers tell a stark story: the house, in this case, was the president — and the house won.