Wallets Tied to Melania Trump Meme Coin Airdropped $1.2 Million in Meteora Tokens – Decrypt

Two wallets linked to the debut of the Melania Trump meme coin pocketed $1.2 million from the Meteora airdrop on Thursday, elevating recent considerations amongst a variety of crypto market observers as Meteora’s former venture lead faces a category motion lawsuit associated to the token. 

Wallets named as melania-liquidity1.sol and melania-liquidity2.sol, based on SolScan, acquired $784,200 and $454,724 of the MET token on Thursday—totaling $1.23 million. Each wallets are labeled as a part of the Official Melania Meme entity on the information platform Arkham Intelligence. The wallets instantly despatched the funds to totally different addresses.

“Why is Hayden Davis getting a MET airdrop? It’s important to be kidding me,” a person posted on X, referring to the CEO of Kelsier Ventures, which helped launch MELANIA. 

Meteora co-lead Soju pushed again by highlighting that the LIBRA launch wallets wouldn’t obtain any tokens, simply an hour earlier than the MELANIA-linked wallets acquired MET.

The episode comes only a day after Meteora co-founder Benjamin Chow was named by traders, in a brand new court docket submitting, because the mastermind of a “rip-off coin” operation of at the least 15 tokens, with the assistance of Kelsier Ventures. These tokens included the high-profile MELANIA, LIBRA, and ENRON tokens that every one crashed quickly after launch. 

Whereas working underneath the title Meteora, the operation acted individually from the reliable automated market maker enterprise of Meteora, the submitting mentioned. Chow can also be not in a management position at Meteora.

Simply two days after President Trump debuted his meme coin in January, the First Girl, Melania Trump, promoted a Solana meme coin utilizing her title for the ticker. The MELANIA token rapidly surged to a close to $7 billion market cap earlier than collapsing 99% to $80 million within the coming months.

When Argentinian President Javier Milei promoted a equally failed meme coin in February, on-chain analytics agency Bubblemaps linked it again to MELANIA, leading to a fraud and racketeering class motion lawsuit.

Chow resigned from his management position at Meteora quickly after, with firm co-founder Meow citing a “lack of judgment and care.” In court docket filings, traders have alleged that Chow performed a central position in orchestrating the MELANIA and LIBRA launches, amongst others.

Soju mentioned that Meteora had labored with on-chain sleuth Dethective and anti-scam instrument Rugcheck to “be sure that no tokens go in the direction of malicious unhealthy actors.” It seems that the Melania-linked wallets slipped by the cracks.

Soju, Meteora, Dethective, and Rugcheck didn’t instantly reply to Decrypt’s request for remark.

Meteora’s token launch has been praised by airdrop recipients who famous the graceful claims course of—in addition to the dimensions of their luggage. MET now sits because the 269th largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization at $263.2 million, based on CoinGecko.

However others are aggravated that Meteora additionally despatched a big airdrop to 3 wallets tied to the President Trump meme coin group. In accordance with Arkham Intelligence, these wallets have been among the many high 5 recipients of the airdrop with $4.2 million of MET. The addresses all deposited the tokens to OKX, which makes it unattainable for bystanders to trace their on-chain actions.

Whereas the President Trump meme coin hasn’t been the topic of fraud class motion lawsuits, it has been embroiled in political dramas—with allegations of conflicts of curiosity and potential international affect. 

Kyle Trimble, the top of enterprise improvement at crypto analysis agency Delphi Digital, wrote on X, “that lawsuit is gonna disappear [real quick] innit.”