President Trump and his business partners promoted him as the “exclusive invitation” of the world, a dinner with the president of the United States for cryptocurrency investors who bought the memory of his family to the maximum, called $ Trump.
But as the unusual contest came to an end on Monday, at least 17 of the 220 winning bidders had discovered a way to overcome the sponsors of the contest.
These cryptographic investors had assured an invitation to dinner, they even thought that online wallets showed that they had zero of memecoins, a new type of digital currency often based on a joke or pet.
That is due to a peculiarity in the rules: the winners were selected depending on the average number of currencies they had during the three weeks, the contest was underway instead of its total at the end of the tender.
The participants expected the price of the currency to crash as soon as the contest ended. And he did exactly that Monday afternoon, looting 6.5 percent once the winners were announced. At that time, almost 20 of the contestants had sold or transferred all their $ Trump holdings, according to an analysis of the New York Times.
These merchants had managed to benefit from the increase in the price promoted by the promotion of the contest and still ensure a seat at dinner, scheduled for May 22 at the Trump National Golf Club in Virginia.
That was not the plan. Trump and his partners, who control 800 million currencies, benefited if the price remained high. Then, Mr. Trump urged the leg to buy the coins during the auction period, and his partners encouraged investors to continue retaining them just after he finished.
Commercial frenzy began on April 23, when a website associated with Mr. Trump’s currency announced the contest. The site said Trump would attend a dinner with the 220 hollows of the currency, as well as an “exclusive reception” with the top 25, which would also win a White House the next day. An Arcade -style classification table tracked the classifications, allowing cryptographic investors to see what they had to spend to make the cut.
The competition triggered an increase in commercial activity, since investors competed for the opportunity to meet. Trump and, in some cases, use that access to boost the policies that would benefit the cryptographic industry.
But the contest was also an opportunity for a rapid profits by sophisticated merchants.
A buyer bought $ 2.2 million in La Moneda $ Trump in early April, a couple or week before the contest began. For last Thursday, the account seemed to have sold everything, embolizing $ 957,779.25 in Flip. (Buyers were identified only by their chosen nicknames. This buyer was called “Noah”).
But because the buyer’s account had so many coins at the beginning of the process, he held the 25th position in the classification table, which means who controls it must ensure a seat for dinner, as well as the White House tour.
The contest has received criticism from both the Democrats and the Republicans in Capitol Hill, as well as some ethics lawyers, who qualified it with the corrupt consumption of Mr. Trump’s money.
“I could never have imagined any United States leader who participates in this type of tap,” Senator Jeff Merkley, an Oregon Democrat, said in an interview on Monday. “The White House and President Trump are selling access to the government and itself to obtain personal profits.”
Disturbing, he said, is that the majority of the winners of the contest remain in anonymity and that many of them are based on the exchange in the exchanges they used for zero coins, seem to be abroad, while others have bought in Tryty Dey.
Mr. Merkley has presented a bill that would prohibit any president, vice president or senior executive official of a branch and their family members to benefit from a cryptography sale. He has also asked the Government Ethics Office to investigate Trump’s role in the Trump company.
A White House spokesman did not respond on Monday to a request for comments on the contest or if the White House tour would take place as planned. Last week, the White House Secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said the president acts with only the interests of the American public in mind and that he did not have a conflict of interest.
In general, the winners of the contest had $ 182 million in the $ Trump currencies at the time the contest closed. They had spent $ 191 million to buy those coins, which means that, together, the winners had lost more money on the purchases they had won, According to an analysis of public transactions data for the times.
This is consistent with commercial data that show that most currency buyers since it was first introduced in January have lost money: a total of $ 3.9 billion, according to a digital Inca analysis, a cryptographic data firm.
Whether merchants win or lose money, the Trump family and their partners get a transaction rate, the coins change hands, winning at least $ 320 million since $ Trump went on sale in January, according to an estimate, industry data.
On Monday, the organizers of the contest seemed anxious to stop the mass sale, presumably aware of the possibility that even the guests threw their coins now that the competition is over.
In an X publication, the official promotion of the account, the Memecoin said that anyone who Hékue in his hiding place $ Trump between now and dinner would be rewarded with an unrelated figure “Trump Diamond Hand”, a type of digital collectible as NFT.
The account also announced that the coin holders would soon begin to win “rewards points”, without explaining how the points would be distributed or what they would be used for. For Monday night, the price of the coin $ Trump had increased once more.