It’s getting harder to envisage that crypto “Santa rally” the market’s been hoping for, especially with FTX fallout fears still prevalent. Still, here’s something utterly weird, Donald Trump now apparently has an official NFT collection.

Yep, you read that correctly. Last time we checked, the “Tangerine Twitter Machine” as Jimmy Kimmel once called him, was no fan of Bitcoin and crypto. In fact, he’s previously labelled Bitcoin a scam and said “cryptocurrency is a very dangerous thing”.

But here he is, below, calling himself a president that was “better than Lincoln, better than Washington” (tongue in cheek… we think), spruiking his very first official collection of non fungibles.

The NFTs feature illustrations of Trump as a superhero, cowboy and astronaut, among other things. Because of course they do. The only thing missing is the line: “Let’s make crypto great again”.

 

Our first reaction to that promo video above was that it had to be a deep fake, but it’s already making waves across mainstream news and it appears to be all too real, judging by the post referenced in the disparaging tweet, below. The @realDonaldTrump handle is apparently now used for the former president’s official Truth Social account.

“Collect all of your favorite Trump Digital Trading Cards, very much like a baseball card, but hopefully much more exciting,” wrote Trump. “Would make a great Christmas gift. Don’t Wait. They will be gone, I believe, very quickly!”

The digital trading cards are minted on the Ethereum sidechain scaling network Polygon (MATIC) and are selling for US$99. Apart from pushing the collectible angle, Trump, and whoever helped dream this up for him (possibly his NFT-loving wife Melania) have also added a kind of sweepstakes set of perks, giving holders the chance to win prizes.

And those include: dinner with the floppy-orange-wigged egomaniac himself, a game of golf at one of his courses, a zoom chat… “and so much more, we’re doin’ a lot”.

For a cutting, even-more-flabbergasted, more-amusing take on this particularly nonsensical non-fungibility, have a gander at Gregor “Let’s Make Cheese Grate Again” Stronach’s Lunch Wrap.

 

Top 10 overview

With the overall crypto market cap at US$881 billion, pretty flat since this time yesterday, here’s the current state of play among top 10 tokens – according to CoinGecko.

Now with all that Trump-related excitement, you’d wanna hope it pumped, at the very least, Polygon’s MATIC token. Nup.

The flaccid nature of the market today can possibly be put down to a few factors. Some hangover sentiment might be lingering from Jerome Powell’s kinda hawkish tone after yesterday’s FOMC 50bps rate-hike announcement. US stonks are certainly feeling it.

Despite the positive sign of at least a slowdown in the level of rate hiking, the Fed has indicated that they’ll be continuing their tightening stance through 2023, even if many economists tend not to believe it.

The other thing that’s dangling like Damocles’ damned sword above the crypto market right now is, of course, the FTX contagion fears.

Genesis, for example, which is the biggest trading desk for pro investors in crypto, is still very much deep in the woods regarding its financial ties to FTX. If that company falls, and there are rumours it owes more than US$2b to creditors… it probably wouldn’t be a great thing for the crypto market in the short term.

Then there’s the world’s biggest crypto exchange, Binance, which has been copping a bit of “FUD” heat on Crypto Twitter here and there, with concerns about its stability amid large withdrawals from the exchange over the past week.

For what it’s worth, here’s Binance CEO “CZ” being grilled by a couple of CNBC Squawk Box hosts today. He gives a decent account of himself, although the whole thing doesn’t reveal much.

Just as many independent voices, it seems, are calling for calm on Binance fears, however. Here’s one:

 

Uppers and downers: 11–100

Sweeping a market-cap range of about US$6.18 billion to about US$330 million in the rest of the top 100, let’s find some of the biggest 24-hour gainers and losers at press time. (Stats accurate at time of publishing, based on CoinGecko.com data.)

DAILY PUMPERS

• OKT (OKC), (market cap: US$465 million) +6%

• Chiliz (CHZ), (mc: US$761 million) +4%

• Bitcoin SV (BSV), (mc: US$902 million) +2%

• ImmutableX (IMX), (mc: US$334 million) +1%

 

DAILY SLUMPERS

• Toncoin (TON), (market cap: US$3.3 billion) -9%

• Fantom (FTM), (market cap: US$579 million) -7%

• Chain (XCN), (mc: US$707 million) -6%

• IOTA (MIOTA), (mc: US$516 million) -6%

• Algorand (ALGO), (mc: US$1.5 billion) -6%

 

Around the blocks

Some randomness and pertinence that stuck with us on our morning moves through the Crypto Twitterverse…

Canadian investor and Shark Tank host Kevin O’Leary has been copping it on Crypto Twitter regarding his appearance in front of Congress this week, which is trying to get to the bottom of the FTX/SBF debacle.

O’Leary was paid US$15m by FTX to be one of its spokespeople during the height of the exchange’s success. Money he says is now lost. Answering questions in front of Congress, O’Leary called out actions from Binance as a main reason for the collapse of FTX as a company.

Still, the point O’Leary makes in this next clip surely resonates with most crypto investors…

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