Blockchain analytics firm Bubblemaps has exposed the team behind US First Lady Melania Trump’s memecoin, MELANIA. It spotted the team moving $30 million worth of the tokens out of the project community fund and subsequently selling them.
In an April 7 post on X, Bubblemaps said 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.”
1/ Huge sell-offs on $MELANIA
$30M was moved from community funds —
and is now being quietly sold, with no explanation from the team pic.twitter.com/UbhAqiiW61
— Bubblemaps (@bubblemaps) April 7, 2025
No End In Sight For The Shady Shenanigans With The MELANIA Token
Bubblemaps mapped out the movements of the most recent MELANIA drama. It stated that the tokens were moved to a single wallet before being split across multiple addresses.
From there, $3 million worth was transferred to exchanges, two new $6 million positions were opened, and $500,000 worth of MELANIA was sold. “No one from the MELANIA team has addressed this. Not the movements. Not the selling,” Bubblemaps added.
This latest move comes after Bubblemaps also exposed the MELANIA team in March for “covertly selling MELANIA tokens via single-sided liquidity.”
Hayden Davis, one of those responsible for creating the First Lady’s memecoin, was found to have extracted $2 million from the MELANIA liquidity pools.
Bubblemaps worked closely with scam investigator Coffeezilla to expose Davis, who also masterminded the LIBRA rug pull. Davis has made millions from rug pulling both LIBRA and MELANIA and earned himself an Interpol Notice as a result.
Although MELANIA and LIBRA are his most public scams, Bubblemaps has linked Davis to many other rug pulls that resulted in the serial scammer extracting millions of dollars.
Worryingly, Bubblemaps said that 92% of MELANIA’s supply is still held by team wallets, stating that “the damage isn’t done yet.”
The MELANIA token was launched on January 19, a day after Donald Trump launched his own meme coin, TRUMP, and a day before his inauguration as US President for the second time.
Per CoinGecko, the First Lady’s meme coin has essentially lost all value since launch and is down 96% from its January high of over $13. It is currently trading at $0.51, down over 9% in the last week.
MELANIA peaked in January with a market cap of nearly $2 billion, but its downward slide since then has left it with a market cap of just $77 million.
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Overall Sentiment In Memecoins Is Climbing: Up 12% Today
Forgetting obvious scam coins such as MELANIA for a moment, and meme coins are actually resurgent. While the wider crypto market has rebounded well following President Trump’s 90-day tariff pause news, memes, in particular, are back in the spotlight.
Interest in meme coins had been at an all-time low amid a wider market crash, and data from Dune Analytics in March backed that up after finding that the number of tokens graduating from Solana meme coin launchpad, Pump.fun, had dropped by over two-thirds since January, falling from 5400 per week to just 1500.
The total number of tokens launched 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 meme coin frenzy this year on January 26.
However, CoinGecko data shows that the meme coin category is up 12% within the past 24 hours. The combined market cap for meme coins is climbing back toward $50 billion, currently at $47.4 billion.
FARTCOIN is one of the biggest daily gainers in the meme coin category, having surged over 30% since yesterday. The official Trump meme coin, TRUMP, is up over 5% as investors rally to the token for the man responsible for the market recovery.
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The post Meme Coins Are Up 12% But The MELANIA Team Have Rug Pulled Over $30m From The First Lady’s Token appeared first on 99Bitcoins.
