Investing.com -- U.S. President-elect Donald Trump announced the launch of his meme coin, $TRUMP, in a Truth Social post late Friday, which quickly soared in market capitalisation to several billion dollars.
"My NEW Official Trump Meme is HERE! It's time to celebrate everything we stand for: WINNING!" Trump wrote in a post on his social media platform Truth Social.
The move comes ahead of Trump’s inauguration on Monday, which is widely expected to usher in a new era of digital asset adoption.
Trump, who previously called Bitcoin "a scam", has pledged that America would be "the crypto capital of the planet" once he returned office.
$TRUMP was trading just above $71 as of 07:40am ET (12:40 GMT), reaching a market cap of $14.2 billion, according to CoinMarketCap.
Major crypto exchanges including Coinbase (NASDAQ: COIN ) and Binance have said they plan to list the memecoin token.
Some 200m of the digital tokens have been issued and another 800m will be released in the next three years, the coin's website said.