BEHIND THE CURTAIN: TRUMP CARD TRICKERY
December 17, 2022 -Durt Fibo

Beware of cards that foretell bad fortune. In my Dec 15 article (“TRUMP CARD: CYBERCROOK COLLECTION”) on the release of Donald Trump’s smash-and-grab visit to the big NFT market, I tracked the producer/publishers back to a house of cards historically peopled by convicted criminals. I also wrote a real-time account of the plunging value of the digital embarrassment; within 24 hours of their release, the secondary market on Open Sea had the cards reappearing for sale at nearly half their initial selling price ($71.89 -down from the original $120).

When that sort of devaluation occurs, and at such a precipitous rate, the usual response from ‘publishers’ is to buy up the entire run, both to stave off further disgrace and establish a perception of higher value (ie, the “Sold Out” classification) -which can hopefully then be later recouped with a profit.

That is exactly what appears to have happened yesterday. You can see here a current screenshot from Dune Analytics, a data provider that shows crypto trends in real-time. Of the 45,000 cards dumped on the public, you can see that 1,000 were purchased by one single crypto wallet (held by Gnosis at the time of this writing). Not a common acquisition in this shaky NFT world unless someone or some consortium is playing pump-and-dump. In continuing improbability, the next tier of buys was also done through (other) single wallets, and ranges from over 300 purchases to 123 purchases, all in just the top nine single buyer/wallet category. Not hard to organize if one Wizard of Oz is frantically pulling levers to kick-start the machinery. From there more batch purchases are tracked in descending order of volume, but the analytics show the shenanigans. These curiously sudden accumulations did manage to re-rig the card prices by roughly double the original in most cases, and drove at least one (the Trump Statue of Liberty) up to $24,000.