Donald Trump NFTs under fire for internal embossing, design plagiarism
The Donald Trump-branded NFT trading card project has come under fire after it was revealed that the project minted 1,000 NFTs in-house – 68 of which were considered the rarest in the collection.
The rare NFTs included 47 of 179 1/1s and 21 of 70 autographed NFTs.
Super rare NFTs minted in-house
On-chain analyst, OKHotshot (@NFTherder) reported December 17th that 1000 Donald Trump NFT trading cards were minted and then sent to a Gnosis vault wallet (Gnosis safe) created on December 14th – just one day before the project started.
2/ The Vault wallet, a gnosis safe, was created on 2022-12-14. One day before the DT nft launch
On launch day, a DT funding wallet sent matic to a DT admin wallet. Which then minted 1k nfts to the gnosis safe: 0xfb65415Ca83B69DA9bC56B4C9C2334fa402baCd7 pic.twitter.com/QLvIcA5p6X
— OKHotshot (@NFTherder) 17 December 2022
OKHotshot claimed that a total of 26% of the 1/1 NFTs and 28% of the autographed NFTs were minted and sent to the Gnosis vault. These very rare NFT traits are found on only 0.40% and 0.16% of all cards respectively. Gnosis’ safe holdings can be reviewed on Opensea.
The internally minted 1,000 NFTs can be accounted for in a FAQ on the official website, which states:
“Only 45,000 Trump Digital Trading Cards will be made in this first series. 44,000 of them will be made available for sale”
However, it was not explicitly stated that over 25% of both rarest trait NFTs would be minted in-house and sent to – what appears to be – a team-owned Gnosis vault.
Additional overview of how they minted the first thousand Donald Trump nfts for the gnosis safe. * buyers had a strict limit of 100 max nft per buyer/household. pic.twitter.com/akwFJMxWyG
— OKHotshot (@NFTherder) 19 December 2022
Donald Trump does not own the project
The Donald Trump NFT Project is not owned by Donald Trump, but is instead owned by NFT International LLC., as stated in the footnotes of the official website:
“NFT INT LLC is owned, managed or controlled by Donald J. Trump, The Trump Organization, CIC Digital LLC or any of their respective principals or affiliates. NFT INT LLC uses Donald J. Trump’s name, likeness and likeness under a paid license from CIC Digital LLC, which license may be terminated or revoked in accordance with the Terms.”
However, ownership of the project is hidden in the official website’s statement on the landing page which states:
“For the first time ever, collect your own rare digital President Trump trading card.”
Moreover, Trump’s post on Truth Social on Dec. 15 — before the launch — added further ambiguity to the matter:
Design copywriting problems
Claims that the Donald Trump NFT trading card designs were taken from Shutterstock and other images have circulated on Twitter.
Matthew Sheffield, National Correspondent at The Young Turks Digital Media, created a thread on December 16 that reveals several alleged examples of stock photos used for Donald Trump’s NFT trading card designs.
It appears that Donald Trump’s NFT image of himself as a cowboy comes from an Amazon image that was slightly altered. pic.twitter.com/OA8L2rHw4J
— Matthew Sheffield (@mattsheffield) 16 December 2022
Centralized and stored off-chain
OKHotshot also identified that all metadata and artwork was stored off-chain. This means that anyone with access to that storage and domain has the ability to change the properties and artwork without exposing the changes to the blockchain for user verification.
4/ If we look further, we find that all metadata and artwork are centrally stored outside the chain. Ppl who have access to the domain/storage can change properties and artwork without being able to verify this on the blockchain pic.twitter.com/mEQIegMuf1
— OKHotshot (@NFTherder) 17 December 2022
