Trump Shooter-Inspired Meme Coins Traded for Hours Before FBI Identified Him

Hours before the FBI confirmed the identity of the gunman who attempted to assassinate former President Donald Trump, multiple Solana tokens were made via Pump.fun that named Thomas Matthew Crooks as the perpetrator.

In the moments after shots were fired at the presumptive Republican candidate for this year’s presidential election, a slew of Trump-related tokens were minted via the Solana meme coin factory. Pump.fun claims that over 1,000 Trump related tokens were launched using the platform before U.S. president Joe Biden “made a statement,” per a tweet.

Some of these tokens attempted to identify the shooter, though many were wrong. 

A prominent rumor was that a man by the name of Mark Violets was the alleged “Antifa extremist” behind the assassination attempt. Photos and videos of the alleged gunman spread through social media and, in turn, a number of tokens were made on Pump.fun—the most successful of which, with the token name TSHOOTER, reached a $200,000 market cap. 

But this rumor was quickly dispelled after the man in the photos was revealed to be Marco Violi, an Italian sports journalist who was not involved in the incident in any way. 

“The news circulating on my account is totally baseless and organized by a group of haters that have been ruining my life since 2018,” Violi said on Instagram, according to a translation. “On Monday, I will be filing a complaint against the X accounts that invented this fake news and all the news headlines that spread the fake news,” he added, further imploring people “politely to leave me alone.”

As the hours went by, conspiracy theories continued to appear and disappear as more details began to circulate. Soon, a graphic photo that was allegedly of the deceased gunman was used to create a Pump.fun token. 

An hour later, the New York Post identified the shooter as 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks. Within three minutes of publication, a Pump.fun token was made using the shooter's name. Just 15 minutes after creation, the token reached a $265,000 market cap. 

It took nearly 10 hours for the FBI to release a statement confirming that Crooks was indeed the shooter. By this point, most Crooks-related tokens had fallen far from their peak prices as the attention around the meme coins died out. 

Instead, the broader crypto market started to pump as the failed assassination attempt on Trump—the perceived pro-crypto presidential candidate—appeared to bolster his election bid. Odds that Trump will win the election also jumped on leading crypto prediction markets platform Polymarket.

Edited by Andrew Hayward