Former President Donald Trump minted and released an NFT collection of 45,000 discreet cards via Polygon in mid-December, 2022. This colorful collection was so awesome, so genius one might say, that it was featured on Saturday Night Live. You need to see it to believe it.
Was it successful?
The project sold out in less than 24 hours, and netted over 4 million dollars on the initial sale.
Within three weeks, secondary sales netted another 10 million dollars.
Trading all-but stopped four-weeks later, with sales dropping by 99%.
We all could have guessed it would play out this way.
But wait.
Five weeks later the total daily sales volume surged by 800%, while the overall value of the collection increased by an order of magnitude.
And it is continuing its steep rise.
Why the sudden surge?
Some say it is because the Boomers finally learned how to use OpenSea, digital wallets, and Polygon.
Some say it is because Trump’s imminent return to social media is expected.
He has been working on his reinstatement with Facebook.
He has been “unbanned” on Twitter since Elon Musk bought the company and posted a poll asking the public whether they want Trump to be allowed to return to the platform. Fifteen million people voted, with those in favor of account reactivation winning with 51.8% of the votes.
Rather than jumping at the chance, when asked if he would be returning to Twitter, Trump responded, “I don’t see any reason for it.”
What is the story with NFTs?
NFTs (non-fungible tokens) are more controversial than cryptocurrency.
Their primary function right now is as art.
However the crypto-industry is moving towards using them for gaming, metaverse “commodities,” item-authentication, proof of purchase, and ticketing (of all sorts).
Indeed some of the Trump NFT cards “guarantee attendance at a Gala Dinner” or the chance to speak with Donald Trump via a Zoom call.
To add a little more controversy…
There are widespread allegations that the concocted the images were illegally taken from copyrighted images found on the internet.
One of the images even seems to show Adobe’s watermark in the background.
