US President Donald Trump’s cryptocurrency venture, the Official Trump (TRUMP) memecoin, has generated multimillion-dollar gains for crypto exchanges, in addition to profits for its creators.
Launched just about six months ago, the TRUMP memecoin has generated at least $172 million in trading fees for 10 crypto exchanges, including Binance, Coinbase, OKX and more, according to a Reuters report on Monday.
In listing TRUMP, some exchanges reportedly disregarded the fact that 80% of the coin’s supply was held by the Trump family and its partners, an issue they’d previously seen as a red flag for exchanges due to its concentrated supply.
While 45 crypto wallets made about $1.2 billion in profits from TRUMP trades, the vast majority of 712,777 collectively lost at least $4.3 billion, according to the report.
TRUMP listed much faster than peers
Among other findings, Reuters highlighted a significant discrepancy between the periods of time taken by exchanges to list TRUMP against other memecoins such as Pepe (PEPE), Bonk (BONK) and dogwifhat (WIF).
The full list of the analyzed centralized crypto exchanges (CEXs) included Binance, Gate.io, Bitget, MEXC, OKX, Coinbase, Bybit, Upbit, Crypto.com and HTX.
“On average, the 10 exchanges took 129 days to list those coins. For TRUMP, they took an average of four,” the report said. Crypto exchanges Bitget, Coinbase and MEXC said they moved fast to respond to “overwhelming demand” for the Trump coin.
Coinbase made a decision in just one day
While most exchanges took about four days to list TRUMP, Coinbase reportedly made up its mind in just one day.
“Given the information that was shared publicly, we were confident that users could engage with the token positively and safely,” Coinbase Chief Legal Officer Paul Grewal was cited as saying.
He also said Coinbase listed the memecoin as an “experimental” token in a move to indicate that it comes with “certain risks, including price swings.”
Although Coinbase moved fast for listing TRUMP, the exchange was forced to block the memecoin’s trading from certain residents in the US.
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Coinbase reportedly blocked New York residents from accessing TRUMP due to potential risks related to a warning from the New York State Department of Financial Services (NYDFS) issued on Jan. 16, one day before the launch of TRUMP.
Referring to memecoins as “sentiment-based virtual currencies,” NYDFS specifically highlighted risks including consumer losses, wash trading, pump-and-dump schemes and other forms of market manipulation.
Some of the analyzed exchanges, including MEXC and Bitget, also acknowledged that they disregarded past concerns about TRUMP’s supply concentration in an effort to serve the demand.
“Eighty percent held by the team, even though there’s a little bit of a lock-up period, is in my opinion very risky,” Bitget CEO Gracy Chen reportedly said. “Ultimately, user trading volume, demand […] overrode the so-called risky factor here,” she said.
The latest figures on CEXs’ profits from TRUMP came a few months after the Financial Times estimated that the memecoin’s operators earned at least $314 million from sales and $36 million from Solana fees in just around three months since its launch.
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