Table of Contents
The first 45 minutes
The very first announcement is from Trump's Truth Social account.
The first public tweet that mentions $TRUMP.
The first public tweet that mention the CA.
X, or formerly Twitter, is a much bigger social media platform than Truth Social. It is heavily used by meme coin traders and crypto enthusiasts.
Our analysis looks at every publicly available tweet with keyword "$TRUMP", created within the first 72 hours of $TRUMP meme coin launch.
What happened during this 72-hour is a mix of disbelief, confusion and buying frenzy. It is reaching a $10 billion market cap in 36 hours, then dropping spectacularly the moment Melania launched her meme coin $Melania.
Hourly tweet volume distribution.
In the next few sections, we show you how the narratives change, who are the influencers, and where do they come from? We attemp to answer: is social media sentiment a leading indicator, or a trailing indicator of this meme coin price?
The narrative
The influencers
To identify influencers, we define an "influence ratio", which is the total number of views one user receives, divided by the total number of posts.
This ratio downranks spammers, who tweet highly frequently to increase their total view count.
Top 10 Influencers Mentioning $TRUMP Coin
| Profile | Username | Who | Role | Influence Ratio | Profile Link |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 |
@realDonaldTrump | 45th & 47th President of the United States of America | Leading the $TRUMP promotion, directly pushing the meme coin launch. | 111,962,684.0 | View Profile |
 |
@EricTrump | Executive Vice President of The @Trump Organization | Promoting $TRUMP coin, advocating its potential in the crypto world. | 14,639,662.5 | View Profile |
 |
@coffeebreak_YT | Internet Detective Exposing Scams | Exposing potential issues with $TRUMP coin tokenomics. | 8,805,961.0 | View Profile |
 |
@jdorman81 | CIO @arca - Digital Assets Investing | Analyzing the $TRUMP coin's long-term potential. | 6,407,735.0 | View Profile |
 |
@DonaldJTrumpJr | Son of Donald Trump, involved in crypto advocacy. | Supporting the $TRUMP coin and sharing excitement about its potential. | 5,682,697.0 | View Profile |
 |
@stoolpresidente | Founder of Barstool Sports | Engaging with the $TRUMP coin in a humorous way. | 5,682,276.0 | View Profile |
 |
@Cobratate | Former Prime Minister of the UK | Commenting on the missed launch of $TRUMP coin. | 4,881,825.0 | View Profile |
 |
@mcuban | Entrepreneur and investor | Suggesting new ideas for meme coins. | 3,857,434.3 | View Profile |
 |
@JupiterExchange | Decentralized liquidity platform | Partnering with the $TRUMP launch. | 2,628,955.0 | View Profile |
 |
@JPATrades | Crypto investor & trader | Tracking significant $TRUMP coin trades. | 2,598,487.0 | View Profile |
How important are influencers? Based on our dataset, top 10% users (15000 out of 153298) generate 93% of all view counts (1.18 billion / 1.28 billion)), an outcome similar to the Pareto principle.
Top 10% users generate 90% of all view counts.
The countries
With the help of AI models, we analyzed each account's geo-location. This geo-location is not the IP address, but where the account owner likely comes from.
To identify which country is more active in the $TRUMP discussion, we calculate its weighted exposure. A country's weighted exposure is the total number of followers of all X accounts from that country.
The table below shows top 10 countries. The United States, India, the United Arab Emirates are top 3. Followed by UK, China, and Japan.
Top 10 countries by weighted exposure, which is defined as the total number of followers of all accounts from that country.
It is worth noting that crypto is banned in China, yet many people from the country are still enthusiastic about $TRUMP. When we plot the top language weighted by view count, Chinese is the second most viewed language in our dataset. Other popular languages include Turkish, Spanish, Hindi, Arabic and Japanese.
Top 10 languages by weighted exposure, defined as the total number of view counts of all posts with that language.
Another interesting country is Nigeria, the only African country on the list. Why Nigeria? Due to inflation, political instability, and poor monetary policies, Nigeria's national currency naira has fallen signficantly. In 2000, 1 USD is equivalent to 100 Naira. In 2024, 1 USD is equivalent to 1600 Naira, a 16X increase over the past 24 years.
US Dollar / Nigerian Naira. As of February 21, 2025, 1 USD can be exchanged to 1509 Nigerian Naira. Source: Twelvedata.
Without a stable naira, Nigerians are increasingly embracing digital currencies, sometimes falling into crypto scams.
The government tried to curb crypto fraud, while at the same time attemped to participate in one. According to crypti.news., Kelsier Ventures, the company at the center of the Javier Milei meme coin scandal, has allegedly considered launching a meme coin on the Solana (SOL) blockchain in collaboration with members of Nigeria’s administration.
Nonetheless, people in Nigeria, who are used to high risk and instability, are also interested in $TRUMP.
The sentiments
We used large language models to infer sentiments towards coin $TRUMP. We then imposed the sentiment chart with trading price and volume.
We find that positive sentiment is correlated with higher price. The postive sentiment on X reached its peak shortly before the price peak. People already became less positive (or more skeptical) before the price peaked.
We also find that negative sentiment peaked at the same time the price dropped (after Melania launched her coin). The co-occurrence of those two metrics indicate that there is strong negative sentiments (such as fear) after price starts to drop.
Trading volume, trading price, and sentiment on social media.
With an understanding that price tends to drop following negative sentiment spikes and rise after positive sentiment surges, we conducted a regression analysis to quantify sentiment's influence on price. Our model successfully captures this relationship and makes accurate price predictions.
Here're the takeaways from the model:
- For every additional view on an X positive tweet, the price slightly increases (small green bar), but negative tweets have a stronger effect in reducing price (big red bar).
- The price of the last hour is the strongest predictor of the current price, which means that price of $TRUMP tend to follow its past trend.
Overall, the number of views of posts with polarized sentiment has little impact on the market price of $TRUMP. It is also important to note that this analysis is limited to this memecoin. We cannot generalize these findings to other memecoins.
Our OLS analysis shows that sentiments has little impact on the market price of $TRUMP.
Limitations
Our analysis sheds light on what happened on social media during the $TRUMP trading frenzy. This analysis has several limitations:
We only use publicly available data from X. There are other social media platforms (such as Telegram) that meme coin traders often use. As a result, we could not capture all market sentiments.
We did not use any on-chain transaction data. For those who want to build robust trading algorithms, on-chain signal is critical.
$TRUMP is an outlier. Many meme coins have a very short life (within one hour of active trading), and a different price chart.
Nevertheless, since 2025, we are experiencing more and more "Black swan events". First we saw the Libra meme coin scandal linked to Argentine President Javier Milei. Then we witnesses the 15-billion biggest crypto hack at Bybit. In that regard, is $TRUMP really an outlier?
We want to hear from you: If you have any ideas, want to learn more, or would like to collaborate with us, please send an email to zhouhan@safelink.network
Acknowledgement: We thank Chris Li, Fahy Gao, Yuki Cui, and Qian Shi for giving us feedback and correcting our mistakes.