... Trump showed the world what an outsized role crypto, and certainly memecoins, will have in his administration.

After nearly a year of frenzied speculation which of the dozens of Trump-linked memecoins the 47th president will pick as his own, just before 10pm ET on Friday night - and just two days before his inauguration as the 47th president of the United States - Trump stunned the world when he unveiled on his Truth Social and X accounts, his "official" meme coin, TRUMP...

... which in the 12 hours since its unveiling has surged to a $30 billion market capitalization, roughly three times bigger than Trump's other momentum chasing venture, DJT (whose market cap is $8.7 billion and has roughly the same amount of revenue or cash flow as the meme coin) as part of an exponential move that has seen its market cap rise (and occasionally fall) by a billion dollars every few minutes.

"My NEW Official Trump Meme is HERE! It's time to celebrate everything we stand for: WINNING! Join my very special Trump Community. GET YOUR $TRUMP NOW," Trump wrote on his social media platform.

The token started trading at an opening price of $0.1824, but within 12 hours had jumped over 15,000%, trading at roughly $30 as of 10:00am ET, 12 hours after its launch. Its market cap stood at ~$30 billion at the time.

Initially, the crypto community initially voiced concerns about the token's legitimacy, with some warning of a possible hack or social engineering scheme. According to blockchain engineer cygaar, the project's official website mirrors those of Trump's previous NFT collections and suggested that "either this is the greatest cyber heist of all time, or this is legitimate." However, as Trump's posts remained online, and with Polymarket data suggesting only a 10% chance of account compromise, skepticism began to subside, pushing the price of the token further up.

The token's explosive growth has also drawn concerns regarding its allocation.

"80% of the token supply is locked in a multisignature wallet, amounting to $3 billion controlled by the creator, who also added $40 million in liquidity," Conor Grogan, head of product business operations at Coinbase, said in a post on X, adding that the project was seeded with millions of dollars of funds from Binance and Gate, two exchanges that don't serve US customers. Other analysts noted that 80% of the token's circulating supply is allocated to Fight Fight Fight LLC and CIC Digital LLC, entities linked to the Trump Organization, with only 20% of the supply split equally between public investors and liquidity.