Last week former US president Trump announced his NFT collection – the Trump Digital Trading Cards. What seemed first like a bad joke or a scam (judging the first impression of the website) was indeed real.
Weird to say that this collection has more utilities than many other projects. Holders can win exclusive experiences with Trump via sweepstakes such as dinners, meet and greets, Zoom calls, or even playing golf with him. This very much reminded me of the VeeFriends collection by Gary Vaynerchuk, where some lucky holders also got real-life access to Gary.
While this all appears under the brand and face of Trump, an independent company called NFT INT LLC acquired the license and launched the collection. They chose the Polygon chain and a very large supply of 45k collectibles. The price of 99 USD was fairly affordable and payable in fiat or crypto.
It turned out that indeed the collection sold out within 1 day. 45k items were indeed minted (1k was minted by the team) generating $4.4m primary sales volume. On average each of the ~13k minters purchased 2.8 NFTs.
Quickly after sell-out the collection was top trending also on the secondary marketplaces like OpenSea. So far 20k+ secondary sales were facilitated with $6.7m sales volume. The floor price was at some point at ~0.8 ETH ($1.1k). The average sales price was $1.5k, almost 15x the mint price. One rare issue was even sold for 37 ETH ($46k).
With ~15k holders, we see a fairly low unique holder ratio of 35%. This is due to the fact that holders that buy 45 NFTs were promised a guaranteed spot at the Gala Dinner with Trump. But what is notable is that this drop (similar to Reddit) attracted the next wave of new web3 users (disclaimer: on Polygon). Looking at the wallet age, 80%+ of the 15k holders had their first transaction in the past 7 days and only a small fraction were more experienced users in the space.
Providing the option to pay by credit card was surely a success factor to onboard new users. Upon payment, a new wallet by the provider Torus was created for them attached to an email address and the NFT was minted to this address. On the other side, we ended up with 60%+ of the holders having new wallets without any crypto funds (MATIC or WETH) to do anything on-chain, e.g. selling their NFT. While having been onboarded, they are basically stuck at the first intersection.
Despite the bear market the space didn’t lose its humor. Similar to what we have seen with other NFT derivative trends (apes, bears, goblins, …), copycats and scammers quickly emerged with other former US president-inspired collections.
