Community Confused by Trump’s Bizarre ‘SimpDAO’ NFT Pool

by · December 15, 2022

Former president and crypto-hater Donald Trump’s bizarre NFT collection project has left the community confused.

Even conservative and ardent MAGA supporters are scrape their heads, while analyst Eric Wall compared the project to a “SimpDAO”.

In what Trump called a “big announcement” via his social media platform Truth Social on December 15, the former president unveiled a collection of 45,000 NFT trading cards, with the artwork depicting himself in various outfits such as golf gear, hunting gear and a superhero costume.

The polygon-based NFTs are sold for $99 per token, and buyers automatically enter contests that include “1,000s of prizes” such as one-on-one dinners, Zoom calls and rounds of golf with Trump.

At the time of writing, there are about 35,600 Trump Digital Trading Cards listed for secondary sale on Opensea, with a base price of 0.065 Ether (ETH), or $82.

People in the NFT community have reported that some of the biggest sales so far have ranged from 1 ETH ($1270) to 2 ETH ($2541).

Wall, who was one of the first who explain The SimpDAO concept and started his own with EricaDAO, noted the similarity on Twitter:

“Wait a minute. These NFTs give you access to a community. A dinner with Trump. Golf with Trump. Zoom calls. One-on-one meetings. Autographs. These are not baseball cards. This is 407506a SimpDAO!”

The term “SimpDAO” was coined after social media star Irene Zhao launched IreneDAO in January. The NFT project offers fans – known as ‘Simps’ – a way to bond over their love for Irene and get perks like free tokens, meet and greets, phone calls, etc. It has generated $3.3 million in secondary NFT sales to date on OpenSea alone.

Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao ignored the politics and was relatively optimistic about what the project means, noting that “the former US president issues NFTs. And he didn’t like crypto before. We’ll get there.”

In response, Bitcoin supporter and Twitter founder Jack Dorsey asked: “get where?”.

While Trump’s polarizing moves are often embraced by his supporters, a surprising number have not gotten behind him in this instance.

Right-wing online account and Capital insurgent participant Baked Alaska (Anthime Gionet) tweeted “I can’t believe I’m going to jail for an NFT seller,” while conservative content creators Hodgetwins also expressed their dismay.

“Man…when all the Patriots are looking for is hope for the future of our country and Trump hypes everyone up with a ‘BIG ANNOUNCEMENT,'” they wrote, adding that “then [he] sending a low quality NFT compilation video as the ‘announcement’ it just pushes people away… Damn.”