decrypt.co
March is on track to be the worst month yet for Trump NFT trading card sales volume, but a late-month surge tied to former United States president Donald Trump's indictment by a New York grand jury has boosted prices and trading activity around the collection.
The floor price—or price of the cheapest-listed NFT in the collection—jumped 24% over the last 24 hours to a current price of $1,023, per data from NFT Price Floor. On Thursday night, soon after the news of Trump's indictment hit, the floor price fell just shy of surpassing the all-time high of $1,079 from February.
On top of that, sales have surged since last night, with CryptoSlam reporting a 404% increase in secondary trading volume over the past 24 hours compared to the previous span. The site reports $184,000 worth of Trump NFT sales over the past day.
According to media reports, Trump has been indicted on more than 30 counts tied to fraudulent business dealings. The indictment is currently sealed, but the charges are expected to be announced in the days to come. Trump is the first former or current U.S. president to face criminal charges.
Much like its namesake celebrity politician and entrepreneur, the short life of Trump NFTs has been a rollercoaster ride.
The Trump NFTs were originally minted for $99 each, depicting Trump in various costumes and coming with various perks, like a video chat with the former president. The 45,000 NFTs were minted on Polygon, an Ethereum scaling network.
The initial response from the crypto community was largely incredulity, but the project's viability was harder to dismiss when it briefly topped sales charts—whether people were buying them out of affection for Trump or ironically.
Even Trump didn't seem to take the project seriously, saying that he agreed to it because the art was "sort of cute."
The initial high didn't last long, with critics calling out technical glitches and questionable fine print, and the price of Trump NFTs quickly collapsed. A mocking mention on Saturday Night Live came alongside the initial peak of the hype.
As 2022 drew to a close, it was mostly bad news, with the Trump NFT daily trading volume falling 70 percent, then 98 percent from the peak. Post-mortem analyses declared Trump NFT mania a short-term fad, and some of the included perks—like the Zoom call with Trump—were being sold off by holders.
Then the tide turned—slowly.
As the new year got underway, daily sales of Trump NFTs surged, and continued to rise over the next few weeks, as traders appeared to be placing bets on Trump returning to mainstream visibility. Amid the newly-revealed indictment, that may prove to have been a valuable wager for some buyers.
Since launch, monthly sales of Trump NFTs have been drastically uneven: nearly $10 million in December, crashing to $2.6 million in January, jumping to $4 million in February, and falling to $2 million so far in March as of this writing. Trump NFT total trading volume has exceeded $18.6 million, according to CryptoSlam.