On April 18, the official memecoin of US President Donald Trump will release $321 million worth of tokens that have already been earned. This is around 20% of the circulating supply.

Token ownership tracker Tokenomist data shows that 40 million Trump tokens will be released all at once. This is called a “cliff unlock.” At the current price of about $8 per token, the unlock means that about $321 million worth of tokens will be available on the market at once.

The unlock might be another blow for the thousands of buyers who lost billions after buying the token in January. Token unlocks are usually bearish events. They involve flooding the market with fresh supply without providing incentives to drive demand. 

Token vesting is a common way to keep people interested in hanging on to tokens for a long time and stop early investors or team members from selling tokens at the beginning of a project. Alternatively, projects set a vesting time that lets people or groups gradually access the tokens.  

TRUMP token could hit its all-time lows

On-chain data shows that 637,000 different investors own the TRUMP token. This is less than the 817,000 investors who owned it when it first came out. Also, there are now only 12,000 wallets that hold more than $1,000 worth of TRUMP. This is a big drop from January 19, when 143,000 wallets held that much or more.

The token’s creators reportedly profited by more than $350 million, but regular buyers have not done as well. Chainalysis, a blockchain data company, says that at least 813,000 wallets lost a total of about $2 billion after the memecoin’s quick rise and fall.

It’s unclear if Trump and his team will sell the unlocked memecoins next week. However, selling them on the open market would be terrible because the 2% market depth, which measures liquidity over a 2% range, is between $980,000K and $2 million. That’s $320 million worth of sell pressure that would send the price into a death spiral.

Other tokens that are waiting to be unlocked

Unlocks are known to cause tokens to sometimes drop even before the event. This can lead to the prices hitting all-time lows. A case scenario is Arbitrum. As of March 2024, Arbitrum made $2.32 billion worth of vested crypto coins available. 

The value of its ARB token was $1.89 at the time. The event did, however, cause the crypto asset’s value to drop. At the time of writing, the token was selling at $0.29, which is an 84% drop since the unlock. 

Next week, Arbitrum will release ARB coins worth more than $27 million. These tokens will only be available to the company’s founders, team members, and private investors.

In addition, Fasttoken and Starknet will release vested tokens next week.  Starknet will give out 127 million STRK tokens. They are worth $16 million.  

On the other hand, Fasttoken will give out 20 million FTN worth $80 million, according to Tokenomist statistics. The crypto assets are allocated to the team and its founders. This totals the unlockings to $519 million.

Memecoins have lost most of their hype after a period when most of them were launched in shady deals where insiders would profit while other investors lost money. This was caused by small investors wanting to “get rich quick” on new memecoins. CoinMarketCap says that the value of memecoin has dropped from $119 billion in December to $45 billion now.

Meanwhile, TRUMP is worth $7.98 right now. It has lost 83% of its value since January 18, two days before Trump was sworn in as president.

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