Here is the latter.

These crypto investors had secured an invitation to dinner, although their online portfolios showed that they had zero of the memecoins, a kind of novelty digital currency often based on a joke or mascot.

This is due to a grill in the rules: the winners were selected on the basis of the average number of coins they had during the three weeks that the match was underway instead of their total at the end of offering.

Participants expected the price of the coin to crash as soon as the competition ended. And that did exactly that on Monday afternoon, fell by 6.5 percent as soon as the winners were announced. By that moment, almost 20 of the participants had already sold or transferred their $ Trump holdings, according to an analysis of the New York Times.

These traders had succeeded in taking advantage of the rise in the price that was powered by the promotion of the competition and still securing a chair during dinner, on 22 May in the Trump National Golf Club in Virginia.

That was not the plan. Mr. Trump and his partners, who check 800 million of the coins, were benefiting if the price would remain high. So Mr. Trump had encouraged people to buy the coins during the auction period, and his partners encouraged investors to keep holding them even after it ended.

Madness Started on April 23When one website Associated with Mr. Trump’s coin announced the competition. The site said that Mr. Trump would attend a dinner with the top 220 holders of the coin, as well as an “exclusive reception” with the top 25, which would also win a tour of the White House the next day. An arcade style leader followed the rankings, so that the crypto investors can see what they had to spend to make the cut.

Competition caused an increase in trading activities, while investors compete for an opportunity to meet Mr Trump and, in some cases, Use that access To insist on policy that the crypto industry would benefit.

But the competition was also a chance for quick wins by advanced traders.

A buyer bought $ 2.2 million from the $ Trump Munt in early April, a few weeks before the game started. By last Thursday, the account seemed to have sold everything, with $ 957,779.25 on the Flip. (The buyers were only identified by their chosen nicknames. This buyer was called “Noah.”

But because the buyer’s account had so many coins early in the process, it was arranged in 25th place on the leaderboard, which means that the person who checks that it must protect a dinner seat, as well as the tour of the White House.

The competition has criticized both Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill, as well as some ethical lawyers, who a corrupt money grip of Mr. Trump mentioned.

“I could never have imagined that a leader from the United States is concerned with this kind of bad luck,” said Senator Jeff Merkley, Democrat of Oregon, in an interview on Monday. “The White House and President Trump sell access to the government and themselves for personal profit.”

In particular, disturbing, he said, is that most winners of the competition remain anonymous and that many of them, based on The stock markets they used To buy the coins, they seem to be from abroad, while others have publicly said that they have bought to try to influence American policy.

Mr. Merkley has an account introduced That would prohibit every president, vice -president or senior executive branch officer and his family members to benefit from a crypto sale. He has also asked The Office of Government Ethics to investigate Mr Trump’s role in the $ Trump company.

A spokesperson for the White House did not respond to a request for comment on the competition on Monday or that the tour of the White House would take place as planned. Last week the press secretary of the White House, Karoline Leavitt, said that the president acts with only the interests of the American public in mind and that he had no conflict of interest.

In general, the winners of the competition had $ 182 million on the $ Trump coins when the match closed. They had spent $ 191 million to buy those coins, which means that the winners had lost more money in the purchases than they had won, According to an analysis of public transaction data through time.

This is consistent with trade data that demonstrates that most buyers of De Munt have lost money since it was first introduced in January – a total of $ 3.9 billion, according to an analysis of Inca Digital, a crypto data company.

Whether traders make money or lose money, the Trump family and its partners get a transaction fee every time the coins change owners, and earn at least $ 320 million since $ Trump went for sale in January, according to an estimate of Chainalysis, an industrial data analyst.

On Monday, the organizers of the competition seemed to be eager to stop the sale, probably aware of the possibility that even more of the dinner guests could dump their coins now that the competition has ended.

In one Post on XThe official account that promoted the Memecoin said that everyone who held up between now $ Trump supply and would be rewarded with a dinner with a “Trump Diamond Hand” not -fungibel token -a kind of digital collection object that is known as an NFT.

The account also announced that the holders of De Munt would soon start earning ‘reward points’, without explaining how points would be distributed or what they would be used for. By Monday evening, The price Of the $ Trump Munt had been taken again.