On Thursday, October 24, 2025, the Solana-based liquidity protocol Meteora initiated its long-awaited MET token airdrop. For many, it was a smooth, lucrative event, a welcome payday in a volatile market. The claim process was praised; the token value was substantial. But when you push past the surface-level sentiment and look at the on-chain ledger—the immutable record of who got what—a far more complicated and troubling narrative emerges.
The distribution data, sourced from Arkham Intelligence, reveals a series of disbursements that appear to be in direct contradiction with the project's stated intentions. Wallets Tied to Melania Trump Meme Coin Airdropped $1.2 Million in Meteora Tokens - Decrypt. Three other wallets, linked to the team behind the President Trump meme coin, were among the top five recipients, collecting a staggering $4.2 million.
These aren't just any meme coins. They are tied to a network of projects at the center of a class-action lawsuit alleging a widespread "scam coin" operation.
Meteora’s public-facing statement, issued in the run-up to the airdrop, claimed it had worked with on-chain sleuth Dethective and the anti-scam tool Rugcheck to "make sure no tokens go towards malicious bad actors." Yet, the blockchain tells a different story. The very entities a discerning filter should have flagged were instead rewarded with millions. This raises a fundamental question that goes to the heart of the project's credibility: Was the screening process a catastrophic failure, or was it never designed to catch these particular actors in the first place?
An Anatomy of a Contradiction
Let's be precise with the numbers. Wallet `melania-liquidity1.sol` received tokens worth $784,200. Wallet `melania-liquidity2.sol` got $454,724. These weren't hodlers or long-term believers. The transaction history shows these funds were immediately moved, with observers like "bozo ✞" on X noting they were cashed out through the OKX exchange. This behavior is typical of entities extracting value, not building an ecosystem.
This entire scenario is like a bank installing a state-of-the-art security system, publicly bragging about its impenetrable nature, and then having the security footage show the guards personally handing bags of cash to individuals on the FBI's Most Wanted list. The discrepancy is so vast it strains credulity.
And this is the part of the report that I find genuinely puzzling. Meteora co-lead Soju stated just an hour before the airdrop that wallets associated with the LIBRA token launch—another project named in the lawsuit against Meteora co-founder Benjamin Chow—would be excluded. This demonstrates that the team had the capacity and the intent to blacklist specific, problematic wallets. So why was one branch of this contentious network pruned while another, far more notorious one, was allowed to collect a multi-million-dollar windfall? What criteria were used to differentiate between the "bad actors" associated with LIBRA and the supposedly acceptable actors associated with MELANIA, when both are linked to the same alleged scheme?
The public statements and the on-chain data are not just misaligned; they are in open conflict. We are left with a protocol that publicly disavowed malicious actors while its own smart contracts were simultaneously enriching them.
The Shadow of the Lawsuit
To understand the severity of this situation, one has to zoom out from the airdrop itself and examine the context surrounding Meteora’s leadership. Co-founder Benjamin Chow, who resigned just prior to the airdrop, is named in a new court filing as the alleged mastermind of a "scam coin" operation involving at least 15 tokens. The lawsuit explicitly names the MELANIA token, alleging Chow collaborated with Kelsier Ventures on its launch.
The MELANIA token’s history is a case study in crypto-asset volatility and hype. After a promotion by the former First Lady, it soared to a market cap of nearly $7 billion (a valuation that was, frankly, untethered from any discernible reality) before collapsing over 98%—to be more exact, a 98.8% loss from its peak—to its current $80 million. This isn't just a market correction; it's a catastrophic value destruction event that left countless retail investors holding worthless bags.
The network's connections don't stop there. In February, the on-chain analytics firm Bubblemaps linked the MELANIA issuers to a failed meme coin promoted by Argentinian President Javier Milei, a connection that directly led to a fraud and racketeering lawsuit.
This is the ecosystem that Meteora’s airdrop just capitalized with over a million dollars. The comment from Kyle Trimble at Delphi Digital, remarking that Chow’s lawsuit is "gonna disappear [real quick] innit," might have been cynical, but it points to a perception that can be lethal in this industry: that capital can wash away accountability. Whether it does or not remains to be seen, but the airdrop has certainly provided fresh resources to individuals at the center of serious legal and ethical scrutiny.
An Irreconcilable Discrepancy
The core issue here is not one of opinion, but of data. The blockchain is a public ledger. Meteora made a public claim about its due diligence. The ledger proves that claim to be, at best, a failure of execution and, at worst, a deliberate misrepresentation.
One cannot simultaneously claim to be filtering for "malicious bad actors" while allocating a significant portion of a multi-million-dollar airdrop to the very wallets at the epicenter of a sprawling lawsuit concerning market manipulation and fraud. The numbers do not add up. The narrative is broken. While many genuine users benefited from the airdrop, its legacy will be permanently stained by the fact that its largest beneficiaries were the ones a credible system should have been designed to exclude. The data has no agenda, and in this case, it paints a very clear picture.
