TRUMP favored on Chinese crypto exchanges in early trading

China gave a curiously generous amount of support to US President Donald Trump’s largest crypto project, TRUMP. In the critical hours of its weekend debut, Chinese traders and Chinese-founded exchanges led trading activity in the memecoin.

Around 9pm New York time on Saturday, January 18, Trump launched TRUMP on Solana’s blockchain via Moonshot, a fiat onramp and wallet provider. His website accepted both crypto and fiat denominations, including credit and debit cards.

Debuting on non-custodial exchanges like Jupiter and Raydium, the token rallied from below $1 to over $75 overnight — imputing a $75 billion fully diluted valuation on its maximum supply of 1 billion tokens.

Due to the prominence of what had quickly become the world’s second-largest memecoin — ranking by Sunday morning beneath only Dogecoin (DOGE) itself — centralized exchanges scrambled to list it.

China led the charge.

Chinese crypto exchanges lead TRUMP listings

Although TRUMP’s first 10 trading hours were nighttime hours in the US, they were daytime hours in China. Due to them being not only awake but also part of a massive customer base, Chinese traders were a driving force in TRUMP’s successful debut.

Executives at Chinese exchanges welcomed the token — and its massive trading commissions — by allowing traders in the country to capitalize on the coin.

As of the late on Saturday (Sunday in China), the top centralized exchanges for TRUMP were Bybit, Bitget, KuCoin, MEXC, HTX, and LBank. Fast-forward to today, the top exchanges for TRUMP by trading volume are Binance, BiKing, Giottus, HTX, and OKX.

Most of these exchanges were founded by Chinese nationals and have substantial customer bases in China.

Read more: MELANIA rugs TRUMP, rearranges CoinMarketCap homepage

The irony of Chinese money flowing into Trump’s flagship crypto project is immediately obvious to his American audience.

Trump is famously antagonistic toward China. He has taken aim at Beijing for years and, in his first speech on Inauguration Day, derided China’s handling of the Panama Canal and vowed to renege on the US promise to relinquish control of the maritime channel.

The launch of TRUMP on the Solana blockchain is a fascinating example of geopolitical irony. Despite Washington’s decades-long competition with Beijing, Chinese exchanges and capital allocators played a pivotal role in his token’s debut.