$TRUMP, a token themed around the U.S. President, has left many legendary wealth-creation stories in the crypto world. Many have rejoiced over it, while many others lamented missing yet another life-changing opportunity. But more than a year has passed; the stock market has surged, the crypto space has dimmed, yet speculation never stops. The various tales of Trump Coin have long since faded from public interest.
Recently, however, someone in the crypto world has become the focus of attention again because of Trump Coin: @kimchi1x. It is said that he made $40 million from Trump Coin.
Unlike many well-known meme coin traders who became famous for making big money, kimchi’s X account has nearly 80,000 followers, but he has almost never posted content related to meme coin trading on X—in fact, he never has.
His X account is full of content flaunting his wealth: fancy food, luxury cars, and expensive watches. Since February of last year, his X account has been filled with such posts—no text, just photos or videos every few months, documenting his life after striking it rich.
That’s why his recent surge in popularity is somewhat puzzling. After all, he has been flaunting for over a year, but this time, posts about him making $40 million from Trump Coin have suddenly spread like wildfire.
This latest tweet reached 25.6 million impressions, compared to around 500,000 previously.
There is much skepticism on X about whether kimchi actually made that much money from Trump Coin. Many have gotten rich from Trump Coin, but those who gained fame from it generally have on-chain records to verify their claims or were already well-known meme coin traders in the community, so doubts were few.
However, there is no on-chain data to verify kimchi’s alleged $40 million profit. @sukie234 pointed out that many of kimchi’s wealth-flaunting images appear to be AI-generated:
Others mentioned that many of the items kimchi flaunts are borrowed from others:
Orangie, another well-known meme coin trader, conducted an in-person interview with kimchi before Trump launched his coin. From that interview, we learned that kimchi started trading meme coins in early April 2024 but picked it up quickly. By November 2024, he had achieved monthly profits of at least six figures in U.S. dollars.
In the interview, we saw his trading setup: a Solana address with a $150,000 balance appeared on his computer screen. He mentioned spending 15 hours a day scanning the blockchain and trading.
He also shared some personal details. For instance, he was studying business at the University of Southern California at the time, mainly because his parents wanted him to. In the video, Orangie also shared the real-time situation of his meeting with kimchi via Discord video chat with other members of their small group—a group typically composed of on-chain verified, capable, and well-known players who trade together.
Based on the above, I am inclined to believe that kimchi’s achievement of making $40 million from Trump Coin is real, or at least I won’t doubt it. After all, Trump Coin has truly created too many wealth myths, with sufficient liquidity for these individuals to exit with profits.
Fate is in the hands of heaven. Orangie interviewed kimchi on January 14, 2025, and kimchi stated during the interview that he would stop once he made eight figures in U.S. dollars. A few days later, Trump Coin appeared, and kimchi achieved his goal, beginning to enjoy life after striking it rich.
A rather poignant conversation took place in kimchi’s Porsche 911. Orangie asked kimchi, "Don’t you believe in long-term holding?"
kimchi replied that he does believe in it, but he has PTSD about long-term holding. Orangie thought it was because he was deeply trapped after choosing to hold long-term in 2021, but kimchi said it was because he took large positions at the highs of $POPCAT and some other large-cap meme coins, suffered significant losses, and thus no longer believes in long-term holding, opting instead to become a "paper hands" trader.
After starting to trade meme coins in April 2024, kimchi initially thought the meme coin trend might end with that summer. At that time, he couldn’t foresee an opportunity that would completely change his life. Later, he felt that meme coins might never see a "grand finale."
kimchi was lucky. The innovation of pump.fun, with its extremely low cost and greatly simplified process for launching and trading coins, profoundly changed the way meme coins are played. Before that, people were accustomed to slow-paced, longer-term community building. The opportunities we missed were largely due to being stuck in the inertia of meme coin thinking, not realizing that attention could be monetized so quickly and so frenetically.
If you pay enough attention to the sharing by meme coin traders on X, you’ll find many young people like kimchi. When they realized that by tirelessly sitting in front of a computer for long hours, being faster than others at capturing the latest on-chain movements, and then clicking a mouse, they could harvest wealth previously unimaginable, they seized this possibly once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and made vast fortunes.
kimchi got into meme coins because a friend from Fortnite shared with him that trading meme coins could yield decent daily income. Looking back, the meme coin frenzy of 2024–2025 might have been the most successful "Mass Adoption" in the cryptocurrency market since NFTs.
Trump, through his Trump Coin, drained an enormous amount of liquidity from the crypto space. And these young people who struck it rich because of Trump, who had no faith in cryptocurrency before encountering meme coins, or who lost faith in cryptocurrency due to the fast-paced nature of meme coins, will no longer let their harvested wealth circulate within this market.
Though young, they have been thoroughly baptized by the market and know its cruelty. They understand exactly what kind of game they are playing.
So, will meme coins never regain their former glory?
No. Whether we are still young or not, we all still want to "change our destinies against the odds."
Young people no longer have only stocks to choose from. They bet on the just-concluded World Cup, trade sneakers, hype streetwear, trade Pokémon cards, speculate on in-game skins... As long as there’s money to be made, any market, no matter how niche, is far more resilient than we imagine.
There are countless young people like kimchi, embarking on speculation in some market with the dream of making $1,000 a day, which would be great. Most may fall in the bloody battles, but there will always be those who reach the peak.
Perhaps meme coins driven purely by attention may struggle to regain their peak. Many players recently lament that Jimothy, a meme image sent by the White House X account and trending globally, barely broke a $50 million market cap. This might indicate that this attention-driven play has fallen into narrative fatigue, and a topic or image trending on TikTok or other social media can no longer easily soar to hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars in market cap.
But this doesn’t mean the story of meme coins is coming to an end. The opportunity to change your life might still be on the way.
