Crypto Twitter goes into the weird, sloppy side of Trump’s NFT collection
This weekend’s episode of “Saturday Night Live” began with a skit poking fun at former President Donald Trump’s recently released meme-worthy NFT (non-fungible token) collection.
“It seems like a scam, and in many ways it is,” said James Austin Johnson, who played the 45th president in the show’s cold open.
While the mainstream media has eagerly picked up the story of the collection for its comedic value, the popularity of the Trump Digital Trading Cards has continued to rise since the collection dropped on Thursday, selling out within 24 hours.
According to data from OpenSea, the collection’s trading volume is 6,658 ether (ETH), or about $7.8 million at the time of publication. The floor price, which started at $99, has hovered around 0.3 ETH, or $350.
The collection contains 45,000 baseball card-style tokens. In each collectible, Trump wears a different costume linked to rare items that allow users to enter a contest to win prizes such as a Zoom conversation with the former president or a cocktail hour at Mar-a-Lago.
In the wake of the project’s apparent success, internet sleuths have dug deep into the project and the parties behind the wallet addresses linked to Trump’s collectibles. Among the nuances and inconsistencies alleged on Twitter: the company that created the collectibles hoards a large amount of them; that the project is poorly dependent on archival images; and that most of the buyers opened new wallets without having any cryptocurrency, holding them with an NFT and no way to get any future value from them.
The Strange Case of 1000 NFTs
Over the weekend, Twitter user @NFTherder noticed something odd with a large number of the rarest NFTs in his collection. The user posted a thread explaining the nature of the transaction data of the contracts involved in the mint.
According to data from Polyscan, Polygon’s version of Etherscan, a “Donald Trump Admin” wallet minted 1,000 tokens into a Gnosis Safe Wallet, a multi-signature smart contract wallet that requires a handful of users associated with the tokens to approve any asset movement.
While the website Collect Trump Cards said that 44,000 of the 45,000 tokens created in the first series would be available for users to mint, it did not specify what would happen to the remaining 1,000 tokens. Where another project may store these assets for a later date to revive demand, data suggests that the administrative wallet contains the remaining minted 1,000 tokens.
Following the collapse of Three Arrows Capital, the crypto-hedge fund-backed NFT pool “Starry Night” moved its tokens into a Gnosis Safe wallet, along with other valuable assets. It was probably done out of caution to keep the assets in one place to prevent some singular actors moving these out of the wallet.
The Trump Trading Card page specified that there was a “strict limit of 100 Trump Digital Trading Cards per buyer/household”, meaning that an individual or group that didn’t have to follow the rules for the general public could grab a large slice of the NFT pool .
Additionally, the mystery wallet is not full of second-rate NFTs. It minted 26% of the rarest 1-of-1 symbols and 28% of the autographed trading cards, according to NFtherder. These are the most valuable and expensive assets in the pool, accounting for 0.4% and 0.16% of the total tokens in the pool, respectively.
NFTherder told CoinDesk that not only do the wallet owners have the ability to inflate the price floor in the pool, but they may also have the ability to rig the contests and alter the competition.
“If this was a collection of 10,000 units about monkeys, the whole controversy would be blown up about how this is a blanket and a scam and that the team has a quarter of the rarest supplies,” NFTHerder said.
The curious marks and the maker of art
While people have been digging into wallet addresses and collection contests, other Twitter users have been delving into pop culture digital artist Clark Mitchell and the artwork he created for the collection.
On-Chain TV founder Morgan Sarkissian tweeted a photo of one of the collectibles featuring the 45th president in a spacesuit that still appeared to have a visible Shutterstock watermark.
She also uncovered an Adobe watermark in another token listed in the collection.
Other Twitter users have found inconsistencies in the artwork, with some of the creative assets used to build the collection apparently taken from stock photos or Amazon costumes.
While Mitchell has worked on other projects as artwork for Disney, Hasbro and Marvel, this is not his first NFT project.
Web3 researcher and Twitter user @Valuemancer uncovered that Mitchell also did the artwork for Sylvester Stallone’s SlyGuy NFT collection that never launched, according to the digital collectibles site.
The collection included similar creative assets, such as drawings of the actor along with exclusive access to events such as the Ultimate Stallone Experience, a dinner hosted by Stallone for token holders.
Mitchell, Sarkissian, @Valuemancer and the SlyGuy NFT collection did not respond to CoinDesk by press time.
The shiny new non-crypto wallets
While NFT collections often attract a wide range of buyers with different stakes in the game, Trump’s NFT collection had a large number of buyers who appear to be new to digital collectibles.
According to data from Dune Analytics, of the nearly 12,900 users who minted Trump NFTs, roughly 9,300 had no cryptocurrency in their wallets for gas fees — the fee all users pay for a transaction on the blockchain. If a holder has no balance on either MATIC or WETH, he is a “No Gas” holder. That means he can’t put his NFT up for sale until he gets some balance in his wallet, the Dune dashboard shows.
This means that 72% of buyers were probably buying NFTs for the first time.
The total number of tokens held by non-gas holders is 21,420, according to Dune Analytics, as one Twitter user pointed out may get stuck due to the more advanced nature of trading on Polygon.
“It’s more like a 20,000 set than 45,000,” said Tyler Warner, staff writer at Lucky Trader on Twitterciting the data as one of the reasons why tokens skyrocketed in trading volume.
Warner did not respond to CoinDesk by press time.
In a harsh crypto winter where NFTs are already exposed to market vulnerabilities, celebrities releasing successful NFT projects or funding Web3 ventures seems a promising sign.
However, when the project is executed before it is fully resolved, it does not serve as a vehicle for mass adoption. Instead, it can onboard a new user base unfamiliar with cryptocurrency or the steps needed to make a sensible purchase, analyze blockchain data for anomalies, and fund wallet transactions.
As projects like these continue to grow in popularity, it’s important to educate holders, dig into the details and see past the hype.
