Bitcoin (BTC) suffered losses during Monday’s morning trading hours in Asia, amid frenzied trading of TRUMP and MELANIA memecoins.
The leading cryptocurrency in terms of market value briefly fell below $100,000, a drop of 4.5% over 24 hours. ETH, XRP, SOL and BNB saw larger losses, while ADA and DOGE lost more than 10%, according to data sources CoinDesk and Coingecko.
TRUMP, the memecoin tied to President-elect Donald Trump, which debuted on Saturday, fell 30% to $49, as Trump’s wife Melanie launched her own memecoin, MELANIA.
“The official Melania meme is live! You can buy $MELANIA now,” Melania Trump published on the social platform X on Sunday. The meme coin’s website describes the token as a fungible cryptocurrency created and tracked on the Solana blockchain.
The MELANIA token saw a staggering 24,000% rise to a record price of $13, supposedly sucking liquidity out of TRUMP coin, which was the most traded digital asset on Binance over the weekend.
According to some observers, the frenetic trading of TRUMP and MELANIA coins represents the FOMO phase of the bull market and could lead to a notable correction in the BTC price.
-Meanwhile, others, like Arca CIO Jeff Dorman, believe TRUMP’s debut is a green light for all possibilities.
“To begin with, the resistance for over three years, both from potential token issuers and potential investors in the United States, has been driven by “regulatory concerns.” This problem is now completely resolved when the president himself is both an issuer and an investor,” Dorman said on X.
“The TRUMP token has just signaled to every business, municipality, university, and individual brand that Crypto can now be used as a mechanism for capital formation and seeding customers,” Dorman continued.
On the eve of his inauguration, Trump is expected to sign an executive order on day one announcing the creation of a strategic Bitcoin reserve.
