Last month, former First Lady Melania Trump sold a piece of digital artwork for $170,000 worth of Solana, a cryptocurrency.
The digital asset, or NFT, was a copy of a watercolor painting of Melania in the wide-brimmed hat she wore during French President Emanuel Macron’s state visit in 2018. The winning bidder also received the actual hat and the original watercolor.
The sale, while eye-popping, fell below Melania’s expectations. A press release before the auction said bids would start at the equivalent of $250,000. It added that a “portion of the proceeds” would go toward “the foster care community.”
This all begs the question – who would spend six-figures on Melania collectibles?
Thanks to the public facing nature of most cryptocurrency transactions, Vice was able to track down the answer. The outlet determined that the entity that listed the NFT also purchased it. In other words, it appears possible that Melania bought her own hat – both the digital and physical versions.
Bloomberg explains:
Every transaction on cryptocurrency blockchains is recorded on a public ledger for anyone to see, and analyzing transactions from start to finish can provide insight into the movement of money. It’s common for investors and creators in the space to own multiple wallets — and even to move assets around between them.
That freedom has given way for some actors in the space to simultaneously buy and sell the same asset and — in some cases — artificially raise its price. The process is known as wash trading. Earlier this month, a Chainalysis report showed that NFT wash traders made as much as $8.9 million in profit in 2021.
Wash trading is prohibited in conventional securities and futures. But NFTs are traded in an unregulated market and, as a new asset class, have not been designated as securities. It’s unclear if the value of the Trump NFT was inflated by the movement of money through the wallets.
Melania told Bloomberg “the transaction was facilitated on behalf of a third-party buyer” and an expert interviewed by Vice said it’s possible someone gave cash to Melania’s NFT company, and that they in turn had to convert it into cryptocurrency to pay themselves.
But that same expert said the transaction seems suspiciously convoluted, saying many “unanswered questions” remain.