Next week, a coterie of crypto investors will share an extravagant dinner with US president Donald Trump at his golf club in Washington, DC. They won their seats at the dinner by purchasing large amounts of Trump’s personal crypto coin. But since their places were confirmed on Monday, almost half have gotten rid of their holdings, whether by selling the coins or transferring them to different wallets, a WIRED analysis shows.
The team behind the TRUMP coin announced the dinner competition on April 23, promising to invite the top 220 holders to dine alongside the president. The top 25, meanwhile, would qualify for a doubly exclusive tour and predinner reception, the website explained.
The organizers selected the attendees based on who had bought the most TRUMP and held their coins the longest between the announcement date and May 12. Although a few of the winners have identified themselves publicly—like Sheldon Xia, founder of crypto exchange BitMart—the identities of most are concealed behind leaderboard usernames and alphanumeric crypto wallet addresses.
To claim a spot at the dinner, investors had to purchase at least 4,196 units of the TRUMP coin, worth about $54,000 at the time of writing. To qualify for the reception, the VIPs held around 325,000 TRUMP coins on average, worth roughly $4.2 million.
At the time of writing, 100 of the 220 attendees have done away with practically their entire TRUMP stash, including 17 of the 25 VIPs. One VIP, going by the username Woo, appears to have made a $2.5 million profit on their TRUMP holdings, which they delivered to crypto exchange Binance on Wednesday, presumably with the intention to sell.
Though the attendees would appear to be eager for an audience with Trump, their trading activities since the competition deadline appear to imply a low conviction in the long-term potential of the president’s coin as an investment asset. Representatives for Trump did not respond immediately to a request for comment.
That sentiment appears to be shared broadly among sophisticated crypto investors. As of Friday, only nine smart money traders—meaning those with a strong track record of profitability—are invested in the TRUMP coin, according to analysis by Nicolai Søndergaard, research analyst at blockchain analytics company Nansen.
After the dinner was first announced, analysts expressed concerns about a potential slump in the price after the spaces at the dinner had been confirmed, caused by a sell-off among investors whose immediate incentive to hold the coin had evaporated.
On May 12, the day of the competition deadline, the organizers tried to encourage the qualifying attendees to hold onto their coins, presumably in a bid to avoid a sell-off. Any attendees who arrived at the dinner with as many units of TRUMP as they held at the end of the competition, the organizers announced on X, would be rewarded with a “very special and rare” NFT. They also teased a “rewards points program,” the details of which have not yet been revealed.
