The winners of the $TRUMP meme coin contest did get to see President Donald Trump speak at a private dinner closed to the press — but his speech was probably the least exciting part of their night. They did get a better, more valuable, and potentially more lucrative experience: the opportunity to network with the biggest crypto traders in the game, win watches worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, and attend a not-so-exclusive afterparty at the Capitol Hill Marriott afterward — all without having to complete particularly thorough background checks.
The vetting process for entering the dinner was a ‘pretty light’ KYC check
After being whisked behind the gates of the Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, Virginia, past a throng of journalists snapping photos and protesters screaming at them for being corrupt, the 220 attendees went through security and had their IDs checked. According to one attendee, many were wealthy but some were living on normal-ish paychecks. The other guests, he said, were largely foreigners from overseas, all with an extremely high risk tolerance for gambling with crypto. The attendee said the vetting process for entering the dinner was a “pretty light” KYC check done by a third party, which he found odd considering he was about to have dinner in proximity to the president. (Know Your Customer is an anti-money-laundering compliance measure that banks, crypto exchanges, and other financial institutions are required to do.)
“I talked to someone about getting into the White House, and it’s a lot more strict in terms of you have to show your passport and all that,” he told The Verge.
“If this is true, it’s disappointing, but not surprising. When we sued during the first Trump administration to see who the Secret Service was running background checks on at Mar-a-Lago, we were told that the government wasn’t vetting the people meeting with Trump there, it was all done by his private business,” Jordan Libowitz, vice president of communications for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), wrote in email to The Verge. “This is a massive ethical issue that we reportedly have foreign nationals paying thousands if not millions of dollars to a sitting president to get access to him, and it’s all done in a way that the government does not have records of who they are. If you were drawing up a playbook for potential corruption, this is how you’d do it.”
According to the attendee, Trump’s presence was limited to a speech from behind a podium bearing the presidential seal — despite the White House having previously called it a private event on the president’s “personal time” — then immediately flying back to Washington on Marine One. “For the most part, it was just him talking about his campaign, and about how he beat Biden, and blah, blah, blah, how we were in a terrible place with crypto before he got elected and now we’re in a great place,” the attendee said.
Though Trump was greeted like a celebrity, with guests clamoring up close and hoping for signatures, the real draw of the event was Justin Sun, the crypto billionaire, who was swarmed with fans and selfie-seekers during the dinner.
Sun came in first place, having bought more than $20 million worth of $TRUMP during the contest. During a prize ceremony at the end of the night, he was presented with a $100,000 Trump-branded Tourbillon watch — the grand prize for the top four winners. (Unfortunately for third and fourth place, their Tourbillons were not ready by the time of the dinner and will be shipped to them later.) Later, there was a raffle for two other Trump-branded watches, each with an estimated retail value of $500.
Other crypto stars were spotted at the event: Vincent Liu, chief investment officer at the Taiwan-based crypto trading firm Kronos Research; “Ice,” the founder of Memecore, a Singapore-based crypto organization that came in second place; and GAnt, a crypto influencer who came in fourth place and had been sharing his preparations for the dinner with his followers on Telegram. According to a report from the blockchain analysis company Nansen, the contestants collectively spent $394 million to participate in the dinner, with the winners spending anywhere between $55,000 and $37.7 million to participate.
If people wanted to keep the festivities going after dinner, there were buses available to take them to the Capitol Hill Marriott back in DC, where Memecore was hosting a private afterparty at the rooftop bar. (The party had apparently been reserved for the top 25, but eventually it ballooned to include anyone else who wanted to attend.)
The owners of $TRUMP and the White House have declined to publish a list of attendees, sparking outrage from lawmakers concerned about the potential for the token to be used for bribing the president. But several attendees were more than willing to make themselves known, giving on-the-record interviews with news outlets both before and after the dinner, posting photos and videos on their socials, and even openly discussing their experiences with their online Telegram followers.
The dinner hosts themselves were just as eager to show off their success. A photographer was offering attendees the chance to find themselves in the event album via facial recognition. At the end of the night, after all the gifts had been handed out, Bill Zanker, the CEO of Fight Fight Fight LLC, asked everyone in the audience to put on their commemorative trucker hats, emblazoned with a slimmed-down Trump and the words “Fight! Fight! Fight!” for a celebratory photo. Everyone in the crowd flung theirs in the air, as if it were a college graduation. According to the attendee, Zanker then asked everyone to hashtag their photo with “Trump meme dinner or whatever” when they posted them.
Although The Verge found photos of the hats on social media, we were not able to find any particular hashtag associated with them.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Correction, May 23: An earlier version of this article misidentified Zanker as the CEO of World Liberty Financial. He is the CEO of Fight Fight Fight LLC.
