The price of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) featuring Donald Trump soared after news outlets released a photo of the former United States president as part of his criminal case in the state of Georgia over alleged attempts to sway voters in the election of 2020 to undermine.
According to data from NFT marketplace OpenSea, the floor price of Trump’s line of digital trading cards first released in December 2022 is up more than 62% from 0.138 to 0.224 Ether (ETH) on Aug. 24, shortly after the former president’s mugshot became public. The image, which shows Trump angrily looking at the camera during his surrender at the Georgia Sheriff’s Office in Fulton County, has gone viral as the first mugshot of a current or former US president to face criminal charges.
Trump, who has largely confined his social media activities to his own Truth Social platform since being banned from Twitter in January 2021 — and later reinstated by X CEO Elon Musk — posted on X for the first time in more than two years with the mug shot:
https://t.co/MlIKklPSJT pic.twitter.com/Mcbf2xozsY
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 25, 2023
The criminal case against Trump in the state of Georgia alleges that the former president and 18 allies were part of an extortion scheme aimed at undermining voters’ will in an effort to ensure he was re-elected as president of the United States in 2020. USA, despite losing to Joe Biden. The indictment was made public on August 14, and prosecutors ordered all parties involved to surrender to Georgian authorities before August 25.
Trump appeared on August 24 and was released on $200,000 bail. However, he still faces federal charges in the District of Columbia for attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election by allegedly being part of a scheme involving bogus voters. He has also been charged in a classified documents case brought by the Justice Department and a criminal case in New York for allegedly falsifying company records in connection with a hush money payment for porn star Stormy Daniels.
Crypto and blockchain have been on the lips of many politicians during the recent elections and while in office. Trump said on Twitter in 2019 that he was “not a fan” of Bitcoin (BTC) and other cryptocurrencies, claiming they were “based on thin air.” However, the nonprofit Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics revealed in August that Trump had more than $2.8 million in an Ethereum wallet.
While in office, President Biden signed an executive order aimed at establishing a regulatory framework for digital assets, but he has also been criticized by many legislators and spacemen. Now that the Trump mugshot is public, many crypto users on X have wasted no time adding the laser eyes to his image or otherwise manipulating it for a variety of memes:
pic.twitter.com/jfiNgAX0iG
— Blade McG IV (SCM) (@Blade___McG) Aug 25, 2023
Related: “Is this a Bitcoin ad?” Joe Biden unknowingly touts BTC in a coffee mug video
While Trump currently leads the Republican Party’s nomination for the 2024 presidential election by a wide margin, he did not appear with other candidates in the first party debate on Aug. 23. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis — who, according to many polls, is the leading Republican presidential candidate behind Trump — has pledged to ban central bank digital currencies if elected. Vivek Ramaswamy, who received a lot of online attention for his debate performance, previously spoke at the Bitcoin 2023 conference in Miami, calling the 2024 election a “fiat currency referendum.”
magazine: Opinion: GOP crypto maxima are almost as bad as the Dems’ ‘anti-crypto army’