Wallets Tied to Melania Trump Meme Coin Airdropped $1.2 Million in Meteora Tokens – Decrypt

Two wallets linked to the debut of the Melania Trump meme coin pocketed $1.2 million from the Meteora airdrop on Thursday, raising fresh concerns among a number of crypto market observers as Meteora’s former project lead faces a class action lawsuit related to the token. 

Wallets named as melania-liquidity1.sol and melania-liquidity2.sol, according to SolScan, received $784,200 and $454,724 of the MET token on Thursday—totaling $1.23 million. Both wallets are labeled as part of the Official Melania Meme entity on the data platform Arkham Intelligence. The wallets immediately sent the funds to different addresses.

“Why is Hayden Davis getting a MET airdrop? You have to be kidding me,” a user posted on X, referring to the CEO of Kelsier Ventures, which helped launch MELANIA. 

Meteora co-lead Soju pushed back by highlighting that the LIBRA launch wallets would not receive any tokens, just an hour before the MELANIA-linked wallets received MET.

The episode comes just a day after Meteora co-founder Benjamin Chow was named by investors, in a new court filing, as the mastermind of a “scam coin” operation of at least 15 tokens, with the help of Kelsier Ventures. These tokens included the high-profile MELANIA, LIBRA, and ENRON tokens that all crashed soon after launch. 

While working under the name Meteora, the operation acted separately from the legitimate automated market maker business of Meteora, the filing said. Chow is also no longer in a leadership role at Meteora.

Just two days after President Trump debuted his meme coin in January, the First Lady, Melania Trump, promoted a Solana meme coin using her name for the ticker. The MELANIA token quickly surged to a near $7 billion market cap before collapsing 99% to $80 million in the coming months.

When Argentinian President Javier Milei promoted a similarly failed meme coin in February, on-chain analytics firm Bubblemaps linked it back to MELANIA, resulting in a fraud and racketeering class action lawsuit.

Chow resigned from his leadership role at Meteora soon after, with company co-founder Meow citing a “lack of judgment and care.” In court filings, investors have alleged that Chow played a central role in orchestrating the MELANIA and LIBRA launches, among others.

Soju said that Meteora had worked with on-chain sleuth Dethective and anti-scam tool Rugcheck to “make sure no tokens go towards malicious bad actors.” It appears that the Melania-linked wallets slipped through the cracks.

Soju, Meteora, Dethective, and Rugcheck did not immediately respond to Decrypt’s request for comment.

Meteora’s token launch has been praised by airdrop recipients who noted the smooth claims process—as well as the size of their bags. MET now sits as the 269th largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization at $263.2 million, according to CoinGecko.

But others are annoyed that Meteora also sent a large airdrop to three wallets tied to the President Trump meme coin team. According to Arkham Intelligence, these wallets were among the top five recipients of the airdrop with $4.2 million of MET. The addresses all deposited the tokens to OKX, which makes it impossible for bystanders to track their on-chain movements.

While the President Trump meme coin hasn’t been the subject of fraud class action lawsuits, it has been embroiled in political dramas—with allegations of conflicts of interest and potential foreign influence. 

Kyle Trimble, the head of business development at crypto research firm Delphi Digital, wrote on X, “that lawsuit is gonna disappear [real quick] innit.”