As crypto onramp MoonPay scrambled to find $160 million in USDC amid overwhelming demand following the launch of President Trump’s official memecoin, executives at Galaxy and Ripple came to its aid, according to a recent episode of the When Shift Happens podcast.
The high-profile and controversial launch of Trump’s official Solana-based memecoin came during the premiere Crypto Ball in Washington on the Friday night before his inauguration as President on Jan. 20
A frenzy of trading activity lifted the TRUMP token to a fully diluted valuation of more than $75 billion at one point, briefly surpassing the largest memecoin, DOGE. That was until the launch of the returning First Lady Melania Trump's own memecoin, MELANIA, caused a collapse in the value of TRUMP. TRUMP and MELANIA have subsequently fallen around 80% and 89% from their respective peaks, according to The Block’s Prices Page.
Explaining the situation at the time, President of Enterprise at MoonPay, Keith Grossman, said his phone started blowing up with comments on the memecoin’s launch, which had surged to a $4.6 billion market cap in just an hour. The next day, MoonPay U.S. CFO Mouna Ammari Siala told Grossman, “we have a problem.”
The issue was that MoonPay has the exclusive rails to Moonshot, which played a primary role in TRUMP’s launch as a platform for buying the token.
Moonshot said it had brought hundreds of thousands of people onchain following the launch, with its simple web2-style interface propelling it to the top finance app on the U.S. Apple App Store.
However, MoonPay was unaware of the launch in advance and simply couldn’t handle the “gigantic volumes,” Grossman said, as “all of the liquidity that we use to wire the crypto to sell the crypto was locked in BlackRock accounts in a traditional finance manner” on a holiday weekend.
TRUMP/USD price chart. Image: The Block/TradingView.
MoonPay’s reserves were dwindling fast, Grossman explained. Asking how much money it needed to raise, Siala said MoonPay had to find at least $50 million in USDC to satisfy demand by midnight that Saturday, Jan. 18, quickly revising that estimate to $100 million.
Grossman clarified that all the money could be paid back on the Tuesday after the holiday weekend, but it just didn’t have access to the funds until then.
Grossman decided to text Mike Novogratz, founder and CEO of crypto investment firm Galaxy Digital, to see if he could help. Jumping on a call, Novogratz reportedly asked how much MoonPay needed. When Grossman told him $100 million in USDC, Novogratz replied, “Okay, no problem. Let me see what I can do.” Five minutes later, MoonPay was in discussions with Galaxy’s finance team.
After confirming MoonPay’s funds at BlackRock, Grossman said Galaxy asked MoonPay CEO Ivan Soto-Wright to personally pledge his personal net worth for the loan, which he did with no questions asked, liquidating some of his bitcoin holdings in the meantime to keep MoonPay up and running, Grossman said, ensuring customers could still access its onramp services.
At 11 p.m. Saturday evening, the funds came through, at which point the TRUMP memecoin had reached a $30 billion fully diluted value. However, on Sunday morning, Grossman woke up to a $70 billion FDV for the token, alongside a slew of Slack messages saying if MoonPay didn’t raise another $60 million that day, it would run out of money by the following morning.
The MELANIA token had also launched in the meantime, “essentially the equivalent of a DDoS attack on MoonPay's servers,” Grossman said. Thinking of who else to turn to, Soto-Wright reached out to Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse, who responded immediately, according to Grossman. Following a meeting, Garlinghouse said he’d speak to Ripple’s CFO and see what it could do but also asked MoonPay to get Galaxy’s team to approve it.
Galaxy reportedly suggested it would be quicker for Ripple to wire Galaxy the money and for Galaxy to then send USDC to MoonPay, with the funds subsequently coming through at 11:58 a.m. on Jan. 19. By around 2:58 p.m. on Tuesday, the customers’ funds came through and MoonPay was able to pay back the loans in full.
“What I walked away from was, these are just two amazing individuals,” Grossman said. “If Mike or Brad ever needed a kidney, I should be the first call they give. I would give both of my kidneys.”
When all was said and done, MoonPay claims it had onboarded 750,000 new customers over the course of the week following the memecoin’s launch.
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