Why the TRUMP launch wasn’t a ‘mass onboarding event’

Trump’s coin may have led to new wallets, but it hasn’t yet brought onchain adoption

January 27, 2025 10:45 am

Anna Moneymaker/Shutterstock modified by Blockworks

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The truth is in the data. That’s kind of our motto if you ask me. And the data around the Trump coin is very telling.

Last week, Chainalysis released some data on the Trump coin launch, breaking down who owns it and where they’ve come from. The most obvious datapoint is that the majority of holders have less than $100 worth, suggesting that it’s heavily owned by retail.

Source: Chainalysis

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According to Chainalysis, a survey of the wallet age shows that a lot of these retail buyers are new to crypto. In the chart below, you can see that the majority have just opened the wallets, compared to the 16% of holders who’ve had the wallet for at least a year.

But the real question, as posed by Dragonfly’s Rob Hadick, is are these new wallet holders going to actually become active participants in the overall ecosystem?

“A lot of people took [the Chainalysis] report to suggest that the TRUMP token was a mass onboarding event, primarily because 50% of TRUMP/MELANIA token holder wallets were net new to SOL altcoins,” he said.

“But that continues to make the same wallet/user fallacies and misses the distinction between interest in TRUMP vs onchain users that are value additive and contribute capital to the broader ecosystem.”

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The caveat here, he added, is that people outside of crypto have been asking about the space. And, personally, I can attest to that as well. But I think it’s fair to say that attention and action are two very different things, and so far we’re not seeing this lead to mass adoption.

Honestly, perhaps that’s too much to ask. For now, we may have to settle with piquing people’s interest. Adoption can come with use cases.

Or so I hope.

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