Who Is Kimchi? The $40 Million Kid

Kimchi is a memecoin trader who studied business at USC. He lives in a Los Angeles apartment that costs about four grand a month, and by his own account he sits at a desk trading up to 15 hours a day. He has close to 80,000 followers on X, and none of his posts are about trading. He makes no videos and explains no strategy. A photo appears every few months, a watch or a car or a villa, and then he goes quiet again. When a person gives the internet nothing, it seems the internet writes the story for him.

A memecoin is a joke token. Anyone can create one in a couple of minutes, give it a silly name and a picture, and put it on the market. There is no company behind it, no product, and no staff. The price follows whatever people are paying attention to that day.

Kimchi got in through friends from his Fortnite tournament days who were posting daily profits on Twitter. He started in early April 2024 with a couple hundred dollars. His goal was a couple grand, and he expected the whole market to be finished by the end of that summer.

His first move was what most beginners do. He put a big share of his money into the popular coins, including Popcat, and took heavy losses. He has said the experience gave him something close to PTSD about holding long term.

That loss changed his approach. He stopped chasing the coin that goes up a hundred times and started scalping. He would buy, aim for roughly 50 percent profit, and sell the same day. A small edge only pays if you repeat it, so he repeated it for around 15 hours a day, seven days a week.

By fall 2024 he was clearing six figures a month. November was a huge month for the whole memecoin market, and December gave him his first seven-figure month. That was nine months after he started with a few hundred dollars, and he was still in college.

The lifestyle came quickly. He moved to Los Angeles, bought Balenciaga sweats and a Cartier watch, stayed at the Bulgari Hotel, and flew to Dubai for a weekend. He paid cash for a Porsche 911.

In January 2025, the memecoin creator Orangie sat in that Porsche and interviewed him. The video went up around and became the clip that made Kimchi known. Certain clips of it went viral, including one where he casually enters his Porsche (which is humbly parked next to his lamborghini) and another where he flashes open a wallet with $150,000. In the interview he also says that he plans to quit once he makes eight figures.

On January 17, 2025, two nights before his inauguration, Donald Trump launched his own memecoin. It went from a few cents to about $75 a coin in one weekend, and its market cap passed $27 billion in the first 24 hours. Market cap is the price of one coin times the number of coins in existence, so a few hundred million coins at $75 gives you a number in the billions.

Then it fell more than 95 percent from the peak. In the first 19 days, over 810,000 wallets lost a combined $2 billion or so. More than a million people ended up down on a coin named after the president.

Somewhere in that weekend, the story says, Kimchi made between $40 and $50 million on a single position. He was far from the biggest winner. One wallet bought over a million dollars worth roughly three hours before the public launch, sold into the hype for a $50 million profit, and kept selling until it had cleared more than $100 million.

After the weekend, Kimchi did what he told Orangie he would do. He stopped.

Kimchi has never posted the $40 million number himself. It got attached to him by other people, and it has followed him since. Nobody has publicly linked a wallet or a confirmed transaction to his name. Some users on X have said that a few of his luxury photos look AI-generated, and others say certain items belonged to friends.

Several traders did make eight-figure profits from the Trump coin, and analytics firms tracked them. The interview footage also shows a real trader with real money on screen. So the size of the number is believable, but the claim that it belongs to him has never been proven.

The story blew up a second time on July 23, 2026, when he posted one photo of a desert villa with an infinity pool and a rainbow-bezel Daytona. Within days crypto Twitter was retelling the whole thing, and “a Kimchi” became slang for $40 million. Jokes spread that a rapper earns one Kimchi a year while a good trader can make one in a week.

Kimchi sells nothing, but the people posting him do. The clip accounts earn from views. Orangie runs a paid trading community with its own trading tools, and his videos feed it. Copy-trading pages advertise his name next to their sign-up links.

The person with the famous name is not the one earning steady money from it. The picks and shovels belong to everyone standing around him, and the market itself works the same way. A memecoin’s price is attention, and so is the price of a legend.