As U.S. voters prepare for the 2024 presidential election, the popularity of likely Republican frontrunner Donald J. Trump among crypto users continues to grow.
In May, since Trump began courting crypto-interested voters, a number of Trump-inspired cryptocurrencies have jumped, such as MAGA memecoin which has the ticker, “TRUMP,” which rose Wednesday to an all-time high. Additionally, a Polymarket prediction market gives the former U.S. president a greater probability than incumbent U.S. president Joe Biden of winning the 2024 election.
TRUMP, first deployed in Aug. 2023 on Ethereum mainnet, has climbed to an all-time high of $15.45, before settling around $13.78 at presstime, giving it a market capitalization of $643 million. Similar tokens such as Super Trump (STRUMP) and Doland Tremp (TREMP) have posted substantial gains over the past 30 days, data from CoinGecko shows.Despite the large market cap of TRUMP, the cryptocurrency has $11.53 million in liquidity, according to trading analytics platform DexTools. In comparison, MEW has a lower market cap of almost $440 million and has $32.62 million in liquidity.
Meanwhile, traders on Polymarket placed 56% odds of Trump winning the 2024 U.S. presidential election. Polymarket bettors have given Joe Biden a 37% probability of winning the election, with former first lady Michelle Obama taking third place at 4%.
In total, speculators have bet over $140.7 million in the prediction contract regarding who will win the U.S. presidential election. However, in a separate bet for who’ll win the popular vote, which has $24 million at stake, Polymarket users have given Joe Biden a 56% probability of winning.
The rise of Trump-inspired memecoins coinciding with speculators believing Trump will win the election comes as the former U.S. president has a small lead in front of Biden in national polls. The national polling average from election data firm FiveThirtyEight highlights that, if the election were to happen today, 41.1% of likely voters would side with Trump, compared to 39.9% who would support Biden.
Trump, who has rolled out several non-fungible token collections and last week began accepting crypto assets such as bitcoin and ether for political donations, has an onchain portfolio worth about $12 million, with a large majority in TRUMP, per blockchain analytics firm Arkham Intelligence.
The presumptive Republican nominee has recently made several public statements aimed at persuading crypto enthusiasts to vote for him, beginning, on May 8, with, “If you’re in favor of crypto, you better vote for Trump.” On Saturday, at the Libertarian National Convention in Washington D.C., Trump pledged to free Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht on day 1 of his next presidency, were he to be elected. He also wrote on media platform Truth Social, “I am very positive and open minded to cryptocurrency companies and all things related to this new and burgeoning industry.”
