Bitcoin is above US$28k again, bobbing about, keeping its head above water in stormy market conditions, in which both US stocks and the DXY dipped overnight (AEDT).

Meanwhile, speaking of things Stormy… as Donald Trump becomes the first US president in history to face criminal charges, something predictable happened. Yeah, that’s right – NFTs trying to make a buck from it all.

And so far, they’ve been selling quite well, too.

Brought to the wider cryptoverse’s attention by Decrypt this morning, a new, prison-themed, Ethereum-based non-fungible token collection called Trump Criminal Digital Cards has been gaining some traction of late.

Source: Opensea.io; Trump Criminal Digital Cards

They’re a none-too-subtle take on the official, Trump-endorsed, heroic-themed collection Trump Digital Trading Cards, which Stockhead poked fun at wrote about recently here and here.

If you’d managed to nab any of those official 45,000 Trump-themed NFTs, though, you will’ve enjoyed seeing the collection’s floor price surge about 25% the other day, when it reached as high as 0.6 ETH (about US$1,122) amid the brewing Trump allegations drama. The NFTs were originally minted for just US$99 each.

Those official NFTs have been on a real rollercoaster ride price-wise over the past few months, though, and have faced several problems of their own, including criticism around technical glitches and potential licensing issues to do with unauthorised, copied images.

The Trump Criminal Trading Cards, seemingly hastily put together about two weeks ago, have, according to Decrypt as well as Nansen analytics data, seen a rise in floor price (currently 0.0086 ETH) and trading volume over the past couple of days. In fact, its trading volume has surged about 260x to about 9 ETH worth. Which, is nothing compared with the official Trump collection’s total volume – more than 13,390 ETH.

Trump has returned to his home in Florida after being arraigned in a New York courthouse. “The Donald” has plead “not guilty” on 34 felony counts relating to alleged hush money payments illegally made to porn actress Stormy Daniels in 2016.

 

Top 10 overview

With the overall crypto market cap at US$1.25 trillion, up 2.4% since this time yesterday, here’s the current state of play among top 10 tokens – according to CoinGecko.

After slumping below US$28k yesterday amid some Binance-related FUD, which has since been completely shot down by the crypto exchange’s CEO CZ and others, Bitcoin has recovered pretty well overnight and so far today.

Dogecoin, meanwhile, has been having a lie down after an exuberant day yesterday on the back of Elon Musk’s Twitter-logo shift from the well-known blue bird silhouette to the Doge meme icon. That said, it just reared its head again and is wagging its tail, lead in mouth.

Elsewhere in the majors, Ethereum appears to be travelling very well right now ahead of its impending next major system upgrade, dubbed “Shapella” – a joining of the two separate Shanghai and Capella upgrades.

The main takeaway for ETH holders is the upgrade(s) will allow the withdrawal of ETH from Ethereum’s proof-of-stake blockchain for the first time following the protocol’s transition from the proof-of-work mining consensus mechanism last year.

The Shapella upgrade is set to occur on or around April 12. Widely Twitter-followed venture capitalist Chris Burniske is very bullish on ETH in the short and long term…

 

Uppers and downers: 11–100

Sweeping a market-cap range of about US$8.21 billion to about US$451 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.)

PUMPERS

• Casper (CSPR), (market cap: US$461 million) +12%

• Synthetix Network (SNX), (mc: US$887 million) +11%

• Curve DAO (CRV), (mc: US$802 million) +11%

• Lido DAO (LDO), (mc: US$2.27 billion) +10%

• Rocket Pool (RPL), (mc: US$914 million) +9%

 

SLUMPERS

• SXP (SXP), (market cap: US$458 million) -4%

• LEO Token (LEO), (mc: US$3.15 billion) -1%

• ApeCoin (APE), (mc: US$1.57 billion) -1%

 

Around the blocks

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

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