The "multibillion-dollar harvest": how meme coins became the most dangerous value extraction machine

Nobody in the crypto sector wants to be identified as the architect behind the biggest financial scandal of 2025: the presidential tokens that collapsed over 90% from their peak, leaving hundreds of thousands of investors in ruin. The Trump family achieved what seemed impossible—leveraging their political influence to extract more than $350 million from the cryptocurrency market in just days.

The weekend that changed politics and finance

In mid-January, Washington witnessed an unprecedented event. The presidential couple’s vacation home at Mar-a-Lago generated so much excitement about “crypto potential” that multiple industry companies donated millions for the inauguration, hoping to benefit during the new administration. On the same weekend as the inauguration, the president announced a new token called TRUMP on his social media. Hours later, his wife launched MELANIA.

Prices skyrocketed from nearly zero to double digits within hours. At that moment, the combined value of the tokens held by the presidential family and their business partners exceeded $5 billion. Then, the collapse was inevitable: both tokens lost between 90% and 99% of their value in days.

What happened behind the scenes revealed a complex network of intermediaries, hidden operators, and technical facilitators that turned meme coins into the most sophisticated tool for executing “pump and dump” scams on a presidential scale.

Who really launched these tokens

Legal documents list the name Bill Zanker as the authorized legal representative of “Fight Fight Fight LLC”—the entity responsible for the launch. Zanker, a 71-year-old entrepreneur, has been a business partner of the president for decades, from seminars on quick wealth to failed crowdfunding projects.

In 2022, Zanker returned with a new idea: NFTs. Trump earned at least $7 million selling digital cards priced at $99 depicting him as a futuristic hunter caricature. With that track record of “quick monetization,” it’s no surprise Zanker ventured into meme coins.

However, Zanker soon disappeared from the radar. He doesn’t answer calls or messages. His only public points of contact were a controversial dinner with multimillionaire crypto investors at a Virginia golf club, where the president arrived by helicopter, delivered a generic speech about “crypto freedom,” and quickly left.

The pattern behind the chaos: Hayden Davis and the Argentine connection

The real clue emerged when a second national leader faced an identical scandal. In February, Argentine President Javier Milei backed a token called “Libra” that plummeted within hours. Milei quickly deleted his support from social media, but the blockchain data—a public record of all crypto transactions—does not lie.

A blockchain forensic investigator uncovered suspicious anomalies: someone bought $1.1 million worth of TRUMP in seconds(clearly with prior insider information), sold three days later, and made $100 million. In the case of MELANIA, the transaction chain led to the same person or team that created the token.

Milei’s crypto advisor revealed his identity: Hayden Davis, a young man from the US East Coast who presents himself as an “entrepreneurship expert” on professional platforms. His true role was orchestrating highly coordinated meme coin operations.

Davis worked alongside his father Tom and a network of anonymous partners under the structure of “Kelsier Ventures”—a kind of shadow bank for token issuers. Their model was consistent: connect with creators of presidential tokens, secure funding, execute internal sales at low prices, massively promote the price, and then sell everything “anonymously” when reaching all-time highs.

According to public data analysis, Davis and his associates earned over $150 million from these operations. More than half came from Libra.

The infrastructure: the decentralized exchange behind the chaos

While Davis executed the operations, he needed a sophisticated technical platform. Enter Ming Yeow Ng, a Singaporean crypto executive in his 40s known in the industry as “Meow”—even his avatar is a cat with an astronaut helmet.

Ng co-founded Meteora, a decentralized platform for issuing and trading cryptocurrencies. Unlike specialized meme coin platforms, Meteora offered greater flexibility, anonymity, and more sophisticated manipulation capabilities. The three key presidential tokens—TRUMP, MELANIA, and Libra—were launched on Meteora.

According to Bloomberg investigations, Ben Chow, then CEO of Meteora, was “deeply involved” in the exchange’s major meme coin launches. Davis frequently mentioned “Chow’s instructions” in internal communications. A former partner of Davis recorded a video call where Chow admitted to having introduced him to “the Melania team” because “they needed help.”

When the Milei scandal broke and the connection was revealed, Chow resigned. Ng, however, maintained his narrative: Meteora only provided “technical support” without participating in illegal operations. “We do not regulate the intentions of issuers,” he argued.

The philosophy of “not judging”: how Ming Yeow Ng built his empire

In a meeting at a Singapore cat café, Ng developed his vision of the crypto market as “pure” because it only reflects “the value users assign based on their faith.” He argued that judging the entire sector for scams would be like “throwing out the baby with the bathwater”—a metaphor he used to minimize his platform’s responsibility.

Ng also made a provocative statement: “The dollar is also a meme coin.” His reasoning is that all financial assets derive their value from “collective belief,” not from real fundamentals. Therefore, according to his logic, issuing tokens without investment value is no different from how national currencies work.

This “regulatory anarchy” philosophy became the DNA of Meteora. While his platform processed hundreds of millions of dollars in transactions, Ng publicly remained distant, focusing on technical development and expansion. In October 2025, Meteora launched its own token with a market cap exceeding $300 million.

The collapse and its consequences

By early December, the numbers told the true story of the disaster: TRUMP had fallen 92% to $5.90; MELANIA dropped 99% to just $0.11—practically worthless.

Hayden Davis disappeared from the industry. His social media went inactive, but the blockchain continued showing his operations in other meme coins. He had become a pariah even for an industry that despises regulations.

A New York-based litigation lawyer described the phenomenon as “the ultimate value extraction machine designed by very capable people.” Lawsuits are ongoing against multiple ecosystem actors, though none have directly accused the presidential family of irregularities.

The legacy: nonexistent regulation and multiplied conflicts of interest

The lack of regulatory oversight is the common factor throughout this story. When operators can earn hundreds of millions from suspicious transactions, traditional regulators remain absent. The US SEC simply warned that “other anti-fraud laws may apply,” but no prosecutor has filed charges.

Meanwhile, the presidential family diversified their crypto interests: promoting the purchase of strategic bitcoin reserves by the government; a son developing bitcoin mining operations; the government accelerating arms sales to allied countries with developed crypto industries; and granting pardons to key figures in the sector who had contributed to previous family projects.

Influencers who promoted the presidential meme coins have already migrated to new speculative markets. Prediction markets, which under previous governments were considered “illegal bets,” now flourish with participation from presidential advisors.

Conclusion: when hype turns into politics

The uncomfortable truth is that none of the main actors—neither Zanker, Davis, nor Ng—really believed they were doing something wrong, at least not within their own ethical framework. To them, meme coins represented a new financial frontier where old rules did not apply.

What the saga of the presidential tokens revealed is deeper than a simple scam. It exposes how an unregulated industry, combined with political influence, can generate unprecedented value extraction mechanisms.

As long as those orchestrating these operations remain silent—protected by blockchain anonymity and regulatory indifference—it will be impossible to know the full extent of how hundreds of millions were extracted in such a short time. The true innovation of the meme coin market was not technological but in how it turned celebrities and political leaders into the final distributors of the decade’s biggest speculative scam.