Former First Lady of the United States, Melania Trump, has got into NFTs. Over a year after losing the 2020 presidential election, Trump moved to a new popularity contest: non-fungible tokens, aka NFTs.
However, Trump's move into the latest fad for rich people hasn’t gone well at all. The Former First Lady's NFT line wasn't a success, but it did manage to sell. However, it seems that it may have been an even bigger failure than it already appeared to be.
The Head of State Collection
Announced in December, Trump started her own NFT platform, chasing the new cryptoart trend. The platform started with the “Head of State Collection”, a mix of physical and digital items that could be purchased.
The “Head of State Collection” featured a hat worn by Trump and a painting of her wearing the hat. Additionally, those who purchased the bundle at auction would receive an NFT of the painting to show off to someone.
Trump’s Collection did eventually sell, but only just. This was attributed to the falling price of the auction’s chosen token, Solana. However, it actually turns out that something more tricky could be afoot.
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Did Melania Trump buy her own NFT?
In a report by Bloomberg News, evidence suggests that Former First Lady Melania Trump actually bought her own NFT. Likely in order to stop her NFT line from becoming a massive failure, Trump allegedly purchased her own collection at asking price.
The evidence for this comes from a triad of crypto wallets. On January 23rd, Trump’s NFT wallet transferred 372,657 USDC to another wallet. That wallet then sent 1,800 SOL to another Crypto wallet. Ads it turns out, that final wallet is the winner of Trump’s NFT auction.
This isn't anything new. In fact, this is an extremely common practice in the cryptoart community. Some creators attempt to artificially inflate the worth of NFT assets by purchasing their own assets in a move known as Wash Trading.
Usually, this is done to resell assets in the future at higher values. However, in this case, Trump's alleged Wash Trading is likely just to make her collection not seem like a colossal failure.