The team behind US first lady Melania Trump’s memecoin, Melania Meme (MELANIA), has moved $30 million worth of the token out of the project’s community funds and has begun selling them, says blockchain analytics firm Bubblemaps.
Bubblemaps said in an April 7 X post that 50 million MELANIA tokens worth around $30 million “was moved from community funds — and is now being quietly sold, with no explanation from the team.”
It added the tokens were moved to a single wallet before being “split across multiple addresses.” From there, Bubblemaps said $3 million worth were transferred to exchanges, two new $6 million positions were opened, and $500,000 worth of MELANIA was sold.
Source: Bubblemaps
“No one from the MELANIA team has addressed this. Not the movements. Not the selling,” it added.
Bubblemaps said that 92% of MELANIA’s supply is held by “team wallets” and claimed that “the damage isn’t done yet.”
MELANIA freefalls from peak high
The MELANIA token was launched on Jan. 19, a day after Donald Trump launched his own memecoin and a day before he was due to re-enter the White House.
The token has essentially lost all its value since launch and is down over 96% from its January high of over $13, and is trading at $0.51 — down over 7.5% in the last day, according to CoinGecko.
Bubblemaps said last month that it found that Hayden Davis, who said he helped create MELANIA, had started “covertly selling $MELANIA tokens via single-sided liquidity.”
Related: Libra, Melania creator’s ‘Wolf of Wall Street’ memecoin crashes 99%
The firm claimed Davis had also used the tactic to quietly sell LIBRA, a memecoin he also copped to making that was shared by Argentine President Javier Milei, which caused a political scandal after the token’s value cratered.
Interest in memecoins has recently waned amid a wider market rout with data from Dune Analytics in March finding that the number of tokens graduating from Solana-based memecoin launchpad, Pump.fun, had dropped by over two-thirds since January, falling from 5400 per week to just 1500.
The total number of tokens launching on Solana is also down, with data from SolScan showing only 31,651 launched on April 5, less than one-third of the 95,578 created at the peak of the memecoin frenzy this year on Jan. 26.
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