Hold it - Melania Trump bought her own hat for $170,000?
I saw this mentioned scrolling through Twitter this morning and had to look it up.
Excellent reporting by Vice as usual.
Analyzing the Very Bizarre Sale of Melania Trumps $170,000 NFT
The crypto used to purchase the former first ladys NFT came from the NFT creator themselves, blockchain records reveal. But why?
https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7vpx8/analyzing-the-very-bizarre-sale-of-melania-trumps-dollar170000-nft
After the auction's conclusion, the New York Times ran a piece describing the sale as attracting a few bids all around 1,800 SOL, ultimately ending with somebody purchasing the NFT for 1,800 SOL worth $170,000 at the time (now $200,000), a price far below the figure touted by the auction's press release and which the paper described as "deflated results" due to a wider crash in the price of cryptocurrencies.
Now, according to Solana blockchain records reviewed by Motherboard and shared with an independent researcher, we know who bought the NFT collection: Melania Trump herself, or at least, whoever set up the auction for her. In a statement to Motherboard from "the Office of Melania Trump," Trump said "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."
Despite the transparent nature of the blockchain, however, Trump's office would not elaborate on who actually bought the NFT or the details around why the transaction was set up so that the creator of the NFT provided the crypto to the auction winner, and seemingly got the funds back.
One of the few plausible scenarios, if what Trump's camp is saying is true, is that the NFT project went through the trouble of facilitating a buyer not using cryptoinstead of anyone bidding SOL through the auction websitebecause crypto was crashing and the bids, all around 1,800 SOL, no longer came close to the stated minimum of $250,000 USD. Perhaps the buyer was willing to pay $250,000 in dollars (or more), and Trump's NFT project effectively made them the winner, converting a portion of it into SOL to win the auction. It's worth noting that the "3CTu" address holds over $400,000 worth of USDC tokens, which it converted a portion of into SOL to use in the auction, and back into USDC. However, even in this scenario it's not clear why this middle wallet was needed, versus the NFT creator address sending the funds straight to the winner and back again.
LonePirate
(13,386 posts)underpants
(182,281 posts)No specifics on what portion exactly. Stinks of a tax write off to me.
According to the website, a portion of the proceeds derived from this auction will go to charitable initiatives supported by Mrs. Trumps Be Best initiative, though it doesnt specify how much or where the remaining proceeds will go. (Emails to her office requesting specific information were not returned.)
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/11/style/melania-trump-white-hat-auction.html
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(13,009 posts)nebby70
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(6,129 posts)WA-03 Democrat
(3,017 posts)PortTack
(32,606 posts)Firestorm49
(4,004 posts)Maraya1969
(22,441 posts)write them out so the rest of us don't have to continuously Google everything.