Donald Trump’s NFTs Have Limits Normal Ones Don’t

Donald Trump is out with his latest digital collectible gimmick: Something resembling an NFT on the Bitcoin blockchain that effectively costs $9,900 but, unlike normal NFTs, cannot be traded by its owners anytime soon.

The former U.S. president’s NFT venture announced in a post on X that collectors who pay $99 apiece for 100 of his “mugshot edition” NFTs – issued in December on the Polygon blockchain – will also get a unique card in the form of an ordinal – an NFT-like digital asset on the Bitcoin blockchain.

“The First Ever Trump Trading Cards officially created the Bitcoin Blockchain!” read part of the announcement tweet thread that featured grammatical errors and non-standard capitalization.

The offer is apparently meant to drum up sales of Trump’s most recent NFT collection. At max, only 200 of these “one of one” ordinals will be minted, according to the post.

But buyer beware: the ordinals, as well as the 100 NFTs that one must buy to get it, cannot be traded by their owners until December 2024. The thread said this limitation is meant to restrict their appeal as “investment vehicles,” but in so doing, it also severely denigrates their appeal as NFTs.