The Donald Trump Collection had a blockbuster launch The problems with NFTs are many, with suspicious behind-the-scenes activity The collection sums up much of the bubble noise that has collapsed the space this year There’s nothing worse than when a riveting movie ends with a terrible ending. You leave the cinema feeling cheated, with a bitter taste in your mouth. As far as cryptocurrency is concerned, the year 2022 seems to be coming to a perfect end. This was not a happy movie, it must be said. Markets have crashed this year, scandals have been rife, and the phrase “Chapter 11” has become uncomfortably commonplace. And now we’re closing with a Donald Trump NFT collection grabbing the attention of the mainstream media. The collection has surpassed 7,000 ETH in volume – i.e. $8.5 million at the time of writing. The minimum price for the collection started below $100 but is now closer to $400.
What are Donald Trump’s NFTs?
The Trump collection launched this month, with 45,000 collectibles that look like sports figurines. They feature the former president in all sorts of variant positions, such as standing in front of Mout Rushmore with Trump’s face added or holding a rifle in military gear with a dog next to him.
But the apparent success of the project has led many to delve deeper into it, with some amusing results emerging. Twitter user @NFTherder noticed that a suspicious amount of the rarest NFTs in the collection were hoarded by a creator wallet.
1/ Turns out Donald Trump minted a thousand of his own nfts to his vault wallet Keeping a giant portion of the most rare nfts in his collection for himself The 2nd minted nft was a rare 1-of-1, the chances … pic.twitter.com/3m0MQGQydp
— OKHotshot (@NFTherder) December 17, 2022
This “Donald Trump Admin” wallet contains 1,000 NFTs from the collection despite a “strict limit of 100 Trump Digital Trading Cards per shopper/household”. So not only are they breaking their own rule, but they’ve also laid claim to some of the most expensive and coveted cards in the collection. The 1000 NFTs are also being held in the wallet which is receiving the royalties from secondary sales of NFTs in the marketplace. It gets a little more tragic, but a lot more fun. People quickly noticed that there were watermarks left on several of the images, revealing lazy editing in the images. At first glance, the NFT below, #29355, looks like no other.
But if you look closely next to Trump’s left ear, an “Adobe” watermark is clearly visible.
He was also far from the only one.
Someone found one of the NFTs still had a watermark from shutterstock on one of the Trump NFTs pic.twitter.com/wmvAPhaRP2
—Morgan (@Helloimmorgan) December 17, 2022
There are other irregularities here as well. But I think I made my point. In a year where NFT volume has dropped by over 90%, the entire industry has taken a huge step back following its explosive arrival on the scene during the pandemic. The Bored Ape Yacht Club (which I’ve written about before) has seen its minimum price drop below $100,000 – seen as the flagship collection by most, it signals the problem in the wider space.
The space softens the noise
In a way, the Trump drop is a nostalgic throwback to the crypto bubble, when speculative bets like this were everywhere you looked. But really, this is a reminder that much of the space is just noise, a quick cash grab by opportunistic creators. It’s been a torrid year for risk assets in general, but cryptocurrencies have been devastated like nowhere else. On the flip side, it’s also the industry that has seen the most amount of bubble behavior, with 1000X screenshots all over Twitter, NFTs changing hands for hundreds of thousands of dollars, and a complete lack of risk management across the board. . Closing out the year with this Trump NFT collection might not rival Lionel Messi’s spectacular World Cup show, but in some ways, it’s exactly what 2022 deserves.
