TRUMP Memecoin Team Announces Second Gala as Token Sits Near All-Time Low
By Verse Press Research Desk | March 12, 2026
The team behind the Official Trump ($TRUMP) memecoin has launched a second gala promotion for the token's top holders, even as the Solana-based asset trades near its all-time low of $2.87. The token launched on January 17, 2025, just days before Trump's presidential inauguration, a timing that drew political-access concerns from the outset. The announcement has the potential to revive the watchdog scrutiny that surrounded the first event, and it renews questions about who bears the costs of these promotions and who captures the benefits, though no named officials or regulators had publicly responded to the second gala at the time of publication.
What Is Happening
The TRUMP team announced the second gala using the same leaderboard model as the first: holders who accumulate the largest time-weighted positions earn access to an exclusive event.
The announcement comes with the token trading at approximately $2.86 to $2.92, down roughly 96% from its January 2025 all-time high of $73.43. Market capitalization stands at approximately $666 million as of March 12, 2026, placing the token at around rank 83 by market cap. The fully diluted valuation (the theoretical market cap if all tokens were in circulation) sits near $2.87 billion, with roughly $2.7 billion worth of insider-controlled supply still locked and scheduled to vest through 2028. Reported circulating supply figures vary widely across data sources, ranging from approximately 230 million to 515 million tokens, and readers should treat aggregate tokenomics calculations that rely on circulating supply with that uncertainty in mind.
The First Gala: Price Pump, Then Dump
When the first gala was announced in April 2025, the token spiked between 60% and 75% intraday before retracing sharply. The dinner itself took place on May 22, 2025, at Trump National Golf Club in Potomac Falls, Virginia, restricted to the top 220 holders on the leaderboard. Those 220 wallets had collectively spent approximately $148 million to secure their positions, with the top 25 wallets alone accounting for around $111 million of that total.
Attendees were required to pass background checks before the event, and guests signed a poster-sized printout of the leaderboard upon arrival. Attendee accounts described the event as underwhelming. One attendee told CNBC that "the food sucked."
Within hours of the dinner concluding, the token fell more than 16%. The team behind the project had by that point collected over $324 million in cumulative trading fees since the token's January 2025 launch, according to Chainalysis data cited by CNBC.
Among the largest holders attending were wallets tied to TRON founder Justin Sun and MemeCore, a Singapore-based Layer-1 team. The presence of these foreign high-net-worth actors at the top of the leaderboard, gaining proximity to United States political power while retail investors globally absorbed losses, illustrates what analysts have described as an asymmetric access structure built into the token's design.
Sun later pledged to buy $100 million worth of TRUMP tokens in July 2025, a move that analysts at DL News described as price support timed to a $474 million vesting unlock. CoinDesk reported at the time that Sun's stated goal was to make TRUMP a global crypto brand.
Political and Legal Scrutiny
The first gala drew immediate congressional reaction. Representatives Casten and Smith sent a letter demanding a Department of Justice investigation. Senators Adam Schiff and Elizabeth Warren called on federal ethics watchdogs to investigate what they characterized as a pay-for-access arrangement.
Senator Richard Blumenthal described the situation bluntly: "What's happening tonight…is in effect, putting a 'for sale' sign on the White House. It's auctioning off access."
Warren called it "an orgy of corruption."
Who Has Been Losing Money
On-chain data tells a clear story. Across the $TRUMP and $MELANIA tokens combined, investors have recorded approximately $4.3 billion in losses across roughly 2 million wallets, according to figures compiled by CryptBull. Reports vary by source, but between approximately 713,000 and 764,000 wallets held TRUMP at a loss as of recent counts.
For every dollar earned by insiders through trading fees, retail investors lost approximately $20, per Fortune's analysis of the tokenomics.
The profile of those losing wallets skews toward smaller holders. While regional breakdowns of wallet losses are not publicly available from on-chain sources, the pattern of smaller wallets absorbing the bulk of losses aligns with retail crypto participation profiles in the fastest-growing markets.
India ranks first globally in grassroots crypto adoption according to the Chainalysis 2025 Global Crypto Adoption Index, with Pakistan third. In Africa, South Africa leads the continent in adoption rate, with 19.6% of the population holding crypto, while Nigeria drives the region's overall transaction volume and ranks among the most active markets in Sub-Saharan Africa. On-chain volume in the Asia-Pacific region grew 69% year-over-year in 2025, while Sub-Saharan Africa grew 52%, driven substantially by inflation hedging and remittances.
Many of those participants may have accessed TRUMP through major exchanges, and the token's concentrated insider supply and persistent sell pressure from vesting unlocks would have worked against them from the beginning. The structure, with 80% of the total one-billion-token supply held by Trump-affiliated entities CIC Digital LLC and Fight Fight Fight LLC, left retail buyers exposed to a sustained overhang of potential supply.
Crypto influencer Carl "Moon" Runefelt, based in Dubai, described his own experience after investing $300,000 at prices between $50 and $60: "It's probably one of my worst trades, unfortunately."
What Comes Next
The second gala promotion is being marketed while the token trades near its historic low. The contrast between the promotional escalation and the current market signal facing holders is the defining tension of the announcement.
India's Financial Intelligence Unit and Nigeria's Securities and Exchange Commission have been tracking the TRUMP token model as a reference point for upcoming consumer protection frameworks around politically affiliated and influencer-issued tokens, according to the TRM Labs Global Crypto Policy Outlook 2025-26.
The pay-for-access structure, combined with heavy insider concentration and opaque vesting schedules, is now a documented case study that regulators in both markets may draw on as they finalize rules on token issuance.
For retail participants across South Asia and Africa who entered the market during the token's 2025 highs, the second promotion arrives as losses are already recorded on-chain. The token's promotional apparatus continues to operate even as the asset it promotes trades at the lowest prices in its history, and no policy response specifically directed at the second event had emerged at the time of publication.