Last month Melania Trump decided to add a new con to her Official Grifter Resume: NFT. She launched a website and listed a bunch of things for auction and linked them to a Blockchain. One of the items to sell was a "Head of State Collection, 2022" which included a white hat worn during a state visit by the French President and his wife to the White House in 2018 and a watercolor painting and NFT of her wearing the hat. Got it, 3 things.
The high bid was 1800 SOL (in cryptocurrency) which translates into about $170,000. The original goal was $250,000, but $170,000 isn't bad. Trump's own website posted the "address of the wallet" that made the high bid, which allowed internet experts to research the Blockchain transactions to figure out where the payment came from.
Are you as confused as I am? Good. I found more info to help us all understand this.
Motherboard, Tech by Vice, is reporting that "it was purchased by the entity that originally put the NFT up for sale, according to blockchain records." WHAT?! She bought HER own items?
Independent researchers and Motherboard looked into the Solana blockchain records and found out who bought the NFT collection: Melania Trump herself.,, or someone who set up the auction for her. The "Office of Melania Trump" (snort) provided a statement to Motherboard saying the nature of Blockchain protocol is entirely transparent. Accordingly, the public can view each transaction on the blockchain. The transaction was facilitated on behalf of a third-party buyer."
[Insert Sure Jan gif dot com]
Despite the "transparent nature", Melania's office would not provide any more detail on who actually bought the NFT or why the transaction was set up in such a bizarre way. Why would the creator and seller of the NFT provide the crypto to the auction winner and then get paid back by the auction winner? That makes zero sense.
Maybe Melania and her idiot husband didn't realize that public blockchains, like Solana, allow "anybody in the world to follow the money, since every transaction is tied to an address and records are permanent." So you can't hide. Not ideal for grifters like Melania and Donnie. Suffice to say, there is pretty compelling evidence that shows that "the winner of Melania Trump's NFT got the money from none other than the creator of the NFT itself, and an address linked to the NFT creator got the money back."
For those that want to get really nerdy, here are an analysis by an "independent blockchain sleuth zachxbt" who found the following fingerprints:
If we visit Solscan.io (a Solana Blockchain Explorer) we see Melania Trump’s Head of State Collection, 2022 NFT was created on 01/11/2022 by 39ui using Metaplex.
01/23/2022 - 39ui sends 473,657.64 USDC to 3CTu.
01/25/2022 - 3CTu swaps 166,900 USDC for 1,816.08 SOL using Raydium (Solana decentralized exchange). A few minutes later 3CTu sends 1,799.5 SOL to 497Z.
01/26/2022 - 497Z makes a bid on the NFT for 1,800 SOL and wins the auction.
Later that day the NFT creator 39ui claims the 1,800 SOL and sends it back to 3CTu.
01/29/2022 - 3CTu swaps 1,800 SOL for 168,313.24 USDC using Raydium.
As of 02/08/2022 all of the USDC sits in 3CTu’s account and the NFT in 497Z’s account.
I have no idea what that means, but the sleuth says that based off of the above fingerprints, "the only realistic option (assuming the mystery buyer story is true) is that the buyer does not use cryptocurrency and sent Trump's camp dollars to complete the entire transaction with, which it did on their behalf." But, this doesn't explain the weird set of transactions and "multiple wallets."
When asked to explain all these weird transactions, "The Office of Melania Trump" had no comment. They ignored requests for information regarding the identity of the mystery buyer (her name rhymes with trelania mump), how the transaction unfolded, if it was in US Dollars and how much the "mystery" buyer actually paid.
It's. All. A. Grift.
