Largest $TRUMP holder buying $100 million more of the meme coin

Justin Sun — founder of the Tron blockchain, largest holder of $TRUMP, expensive banana buyer, and adviser and investor of President Trump-backed crypto project World Liberty Financial — announced plans to purchase another $100 million worth of the sitting president’s namesake meme coin. 

Trump’s meme coin has jumped 4.5% in the last 24 hours, while the native cryptocurrency of the Tron network has remained flat. 

The announcement comes less than two months after Sun attended a dinner dedicated to $TRUMP meme coin whales.

Sun’s plans to acquire more $TRUMP is “plainly corruption,” says Carlos Mercado, an economist and architect of blockchain protocol True Freeze. “Buy $TRUMP and get access, and also get your SEC lawsuits closed up. It’s naked bribery and corruption,” Mercado told Sherwood News. 

In 2023, the SEC charged Sun and three of his companies for the unregistered sales of crypto asset securities and the fraudulent manipulation of TRX in secondary markets through wash trading. 

A few weeks after Trump won the 2024 presidential election, Sun invested $30 million in World Liberty Financial, becoming “its largest investor” at the time, he posted on X. The crypto project would name Sun an adviser a day later. 

In January, Sun announced an additional $45 million investment in World Liberty Financial, while World Liberty purchased $2.6 million worth of TRX. The Trump-backed crypto project currently holds nearly 40.7 million TRX tokens, or about $12 million, making it the sixth-largest holder of TRX, on-chain data from blockchain analytics firm Arkham Intelligence shows. 

In February, the US Securities and Exchange Commission and Sun jointly requested a federal judge to pause the agency’s regulatory actions “to allow the parties to explore a potential resolution.” 

Instead of a way to “buy favors,” Nicolai Søndergaard, a research analyst at crypto data firm Nansen, sees Sun’s further acquisition of $TRUMP as an “expensive networking event.”

“The minimum intention I infer is that Justin Sun and in extension TRON is positioning in a way that will benefit his/their existing bags and bets,” Søndergaard told Sherwood.