Meteora's MET Airdrop Sparks Controversy as $5.4 Million Sent to Trumpcoin Wallet

Controversial profits

The highly anticipated Meteora (MET) airdrop event — one of the Solana ecosystem’s biggest in Q4 2025 — has sparked backlash in the crypto community after on-chain analysts discovered that wallets associated with the Melania and Trump memecoin projects received a total of over $5.4 million in MET tokens, despite Meteora’s earlier statement that such wallets would be excluded.

On September 15, 2025, Meteora's MET TGE distributed 10% of the total 1 billion tokens (100 million MET) to initial liquidity providers (LPs) and community contributors, worth approximately $100 million at a launch price of $1. The protocol touted an algorithm based on LP contributions, TVL snapshots, and a "tamper-proof" scoring method to ensure fair rewards.

However, Arkham Intelligence's forensic investigation — published on October 23 — found that three wallets associated with $TRUMP and $MELANIA LP positions received a difference of $4.2 million (4.2 million MET), while two other addresses associated with Melania collected an additional $1.2 million.

These wallets, marked as collectives with known team multi-signature tokens from memecoin launches, dumped 70% of their holdings within 48 hours via Jupiter DEX, netting $3.8 million in SOL proceeds during MET's initial 20% price surge.

Meteora co-founder Ben Chow, who resigned in February 2025 amid separate insider trading investigations related to the Trump/Melania issuances, was accused of being involved in the LP setups. The platform's claim of "excluding high-risk addresses" through on-chain filtering rings hollow, as the wallets avoided detection through nested proxies—a tactic Chainalysis calls "common in political memecoin operations."

The media is turning towards

Airdrops are a core element of user acquisition and governance distribution in DeFi. When a project promises transparency but fails to meet its own eligibility standards, it erodes community confidence in governance fairness and legitimacy.

For Meteora — a protocol that positions itself as Solana’s liquidity middleware — this incident could hamper their upcoming governance rollout and further complicate relationships with institutional liquidity providers who value transparency.

The memecoins associated with Trump and Melania are already controversial, mixing political popularity with speculative trading. Their involvement in a serious DeFi airdrop raises broader questions about the infiltration of political capital into on-chain ecosystems and how protocols determine neutrality in token distribution.

The issue is particularly sensitive amid ongoing political turmoil — especially after President Trump recently pardoned Binance founder CZ, which reignited the debate about crypto's relevance to politics.

This controversy exposes the limitations of automated airdrop filtering. Many protocols rely on heuristic anti-sybil models, clustering algorithms, and blacklisting datasets, which may not be able to weed out wallets that engage in complex ecological activity.

Meteora’s experience emphasizes that technical exclusion tools must be aligned with human-verified review processes — especially for large-scale governance token launches.

Evaluation and Conclusion

Despite the controversy, MET initially traded around $1.02 at launch before falling to $0.84 within 24 hours as traders considered reputational risks. On Solana decentralized exchanges, liquidity remained strong but volatility spiked 40%, with some liquidity providers temporarily withdrawing MET pairs until the situation was clarified.

Analysts note that this incident may mirror past controversies such as Arbitrum's DAO token distribution in 2023 or Blur's airdrop allocation dispute, which caused temporary selling pressure but ultimately did not derail long-term growth.

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