Donald Trump’s fourth NFT collection is either doing great or terribly one day after debuting. It just on depends how you look at it.
It is no small feat that the collection of digital trading cards—which features the former president in a plethora of fantastical poses and costumes—has managed to rake in over $2 million worth of sales since Tuesday’s debut in a weakened NFT market.
CryptoPunks, the most valuable and prestigious NFT collection by a country mile, did less than half of that volume in the last 24 hours ($754,000, according to NFT Price Floor).
But considering the enormous size of the collection, relatively few people have opted to buy into Trump’s latest crypto gambit at this point. Only about 20,700 of the “America First Edition” digital cards have been minted on Ethereum scaling network Polygon, out of a potential 360,000.
For most, if not all NFT collections, selling only 5.7% of your total supply after a day or so would all but certainly be considered a pretty dismal failure.
When Trump initially came on the NFT scene, his first two collections sold out rapidly. They were far smaller, though, consisting of 44,000 and 46,000 NFTs, respectively. Then the Republican presidential nominee—or at least the company licensed to use his imagery—opted to go bigger last December, offering up 100,000 NFTs in his third collection. Only about half of them sold.
If Trump eventually sells out his latest NFT project, the project will ultimately rake in $35.6 million, at $99 per trading card. While the project’s actual haul is (as of yet) substantially lower, though, it’s certainly not chump change.
Those funds will not be used to finance the entrepreneur’s presidential campaign, according to the project website. But they may be spent to fulfill the various bonus perks offered to NFT buyers, such as attendance at a gala dinner with Trump, golden Trump-branded sneakers, and a piece of the suit Trump wore during his recent debate with President Joe Biden.
This latest batch of Trump NFTs can also not be resold on secondary marketplaces until January 31, 2025, echoing a similar limitation placed on the last collection.
That caution may not have been misguided. On Wednesday, the popular NFT marketplace OpenSea—on which Trump’s new collection is currently listed—revealed that it recently received a Wells Notice from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
This means, in the words of company co-founder and CEO Devin Finzer, that the agency plans to sue “because they believe NFTs on our platform are securities.”
Edited by Andrew Hayward