Love him or hate him, former President Donald J. Trump is certainly entertaining. There's an entire cottage industry built around watching the news in hopes of hearing some headline about Trump being charged with crimes, while another industry exists around Trump himself, wherein he monetizes his name. This really came to light a month ago when Trump claimed he had a huge announcement that would rock the country. Both sides of the aisle sat on the edge of their seats, wondering what it could be. One side, of course, rooted for failure and for the announcement to involve him leaving the country or something. The other side hoped it would be related to his presidency in some way. When the news broke last week, both sides joined together for the first time in criticizing Trump for the move. He released a set of NFT digital trading cards. Yes, that is just as silly as it sounds.
The NFT trading card set featured pictures of Trump posing as a superhero, in various outfits. You couldn't make this up if someone paid you. As if NFTs weren't collapsing enough, Donald Trump may have put the final nail in the coffin. For millions of people out there, they viewed blockchain in its entirety as a wise investment option. You can pick up NFTs for cheap (or even create them yourself to sell), and there are all sorts of crypto options you can buy into for mere pennies. Bitcoins could be purchased for a few bucks only a few short years ago, and everyone knows how that story ended. There were thousands of millionaires and billionaires minted off of Bitcoin. Elon Musk went from ridiculously rich to the richest man on Earth with crypto.
Over the past few months, NFTs have been failing, and people have been asking the same question: Is this really a wise opportunity for personal investing? The market was split. It's not as if NFTs were outright collapsing; some of the most expensive were just losing their value, and some of the newer ones were not commanding the same market rates as years previous. For many investors, this was viewed as just a simple dip in the market. "It will pick back up," hopeful people thought. After all, every financial market on Earth goes through this same sort of ebb and flow. Though when Donald Trump released his digital trading cards, most people who had hope just gave up. It's being viewed as someone trying to use his name to milk more money from his supporters, and he's infecting blockchain with this now.
People wonder: What's next? A Joe Biden crypto coin? Obama commemorative holiday cards? Ted Cruz nickels? Blockchain, good or bad, was something purely by the people, for the people. It was the epitome of the free market. Best of all, it was a cheap way for the every-man to practice personal investing in a low-risk, high-reward format that wasn't regulated and controlled by the government like the stock market, FOREX and other markets. Though because a former President of the United States demands to be seen as relevant, everything that made blockchain magical has now failed. Few people take it seriously anymore.
Oh, It Gets Much Worse
The biggest issue here isn't just that Trump invaded the NFT market hoping to sell some digital trading cards to his supporters. It's the fact that Trump's team that created the NFTs seems to have stolen designs from other creators. Mere minutes after Trump's announcement, before the laughter even died down, people started to notice that Trump's NFTs weren't actually Trump's at all. Rather, they belonged to other creators, and whoever made Trump's digital trading cards literally just pasted Donald Trump's head on bodies that were created by other artists. So not only do these NFTs harm blockchain because of their express political targeting, but they also steal credibility away from NFTs.
NFT stands for Non-Fungible Token, and the idea behind them is that you have the original copy if you buy it. Sure, copy-paste and screen shots still exist, but if you own the original, no one can take that way. Just like there's only one Mona Lisa but endless carbon copies that appear to be identical. If you have the original, that's what it's all about. That's why NFTs are worth something; they're seen as collectors' items. But if these NFTs are being stolen just to paste someone's face over them, then they start to lose credibility.
If you're considering a solid personal investment, you might want to avoid blockchain NFTs. At least for the foreseeable future.
