More Than Luck: How the $100 Million Trump Meme Coin Whale Got the Inside Scoop – Decrypt

The identity of the suspiciously well-timed trader who turned $1 million worth of Solana (SOL) into over $116 million by jumping on President Donald Trump’s meme coin launch last month has been unmasked—and new details have surfaced as to how they were able to get in on the token so incredibly quickly. Hint: it wasn’t luck.

According to analysis by the on-chain research firm Bubblemaps, the trader in question has been identified as Naseem—a notorious, pseudonymous crypto investor and hacker with a reputation in the Solana community for token sniping.

In unearthing Naseem’s identity, however, on-chain sleuths discovered an even more curious detail: More than two hours before Trump publicly announced his meme coin, Naseem attempted to buy up a giant stash of the president’s token at the correct contract address.

How could that be possible? During any meme coin launch, let alone that of a U.S. president, such signs can indicate that a project was vulnerable to insider trading—meaning certain traders had a heads-up about a token’s legitimacy and launch, which would allow them to buy up coins in the project’s first seconds of existence and see their value balloon as the public began investing.

If Naseem got a heads-up about Trump’s multi-billion-dollar token launch, several hours before it went live, where did that information come from?

The trader, when pressed on the issue by Bubblemaps, claimed that he had no advance warning from any of Trump’s team—but instead manually discovered on-chain evidence that indicated the president was launching a token with the help of one of Solana’s biggest decentralized exchanges. 

That alibi may actually check out. A Bubblemaps researcher told Decrypt that Meteora, a Solana decentralized exchange that helped coordinate the TRUMP token launch, did use its admin account to interact with a pool designed to exchange TRUMP for USDC a full day before Trump announced the token publicly. 

By doing so, the Meteora team—whether it intended to or not—implicitly gave a stamp of legitimacy to an official TRUMP token that otherwise could have been made by any random crypto user. 

That crucial bit of information, however, was—at the time—an incredibly valuable needle hidden in a haystack of over 100 million seemingly ordinary transactions filtering through the Solana network. Bubblemaps told Decrypt it has not yet found evidence of any other traders who noticed and took advantage of that detail to uncover the TRUMP token before its public launch. 

When Naseem attempted to scoop up TRUMP tokens hours before the president first announced its existence via Truth Social, the transaction failed—because the TRUMP/USDC pool was not yet toggled active by its admins. 

Would other insiders have shown up to buy TRUMP in droves, before the public found out about the token, had the liquidity pool already been active? Were those traders the ones who rushed in within a split-second of the president’s announcement to scoop up droves of tokens, before most people were even sure the whole thing wasn’t a scam? Some mysteries still abound.

Edited by Andrew Hayward