Nifty News: Trump NFTs go Ordinal, Zuck’s metaverse a ‘decade’ away and more

Trump dangles free Ordinals to sell more Mugshot NFTs

Donald Trump is banking on Bitcoin Ordinals to push up sales of his controversial Mugshot Edition nonfungible tokens (NFTs).

The team behind the former United States president’s NFT collection has announced that any user who purchased 100 or more Mugshot Editions of the Trump Digital Trading Cards NFTs will now receive a “One-of-One” trading card as a Bitcoin Ordinal.

According to a Jan. 18 post on X (formerly Twitter) from CollectTrumpCards, only 200 unique Ordinals NFTs will ever be minted, and they will only be available to those who spend $99 apiece for at least 100 of his latest Mugshot NFTs — meaning the user would have had to spend at least $9,900 in total.

1. Great News Collectors! When you purchase 100 Trump Digital Trading Cards using Crypto (WETH) on https://t.co/vrpHbxyrFG Mugshot Edition, you also get a One-of-One Trump Digital Trading Card.

Your One-of-One card will be minted as a Bitcoin Ordinal!

— CollectTrumpCards (@CollectTrump) January 18, 2024

Trump’s Mugshot collection was launched in December 2023 on the Polygon network. The Mugshot NFTs could be purchased with a credit card or natively with Wrapped Ether (WETH).

Notably, the Mugshot NFTs and the Ordinals cannot be traded until December 2024. The official X account for the project said this was to disincentivize their use as “investment vehicles” and claimed that the new NFTs were for “individual enjoyment only.”

Pudgy Penguins record new all-time-high

The Pudgy Penguins NFT collection hit a massive new all-time high on Jan. 17, reaching a peak floor price of 19.05 ETH, equivalent to $47,000.

The Penguins climbed from 10.78 ETH to 17.8 ETH in just seven days, one of the only NFT collections in the broader market to make such a significant move. It comes as other mainstay collections, including Bored Ape Yacht Club, continue to post losses for their holders.

Much of the project’s continued growth — despite facing headwinds through most of 2023 — has been credited to the collection’s owner, Luca Netz, who  bought the project in April 2022 .

Netz has taken a unique approach to building the project by creating external revenue streams from selling plushie toys and growing the project’s Instagram page, which is centered largely around mental health awareness.

NFT trading volumes plunge almost $15 billion in 2023: CoinGecko

NFTs on the top 10 blockchain networks generated a total of $11.3 billion in trading volume in 2023, marking a whopping total decline of $14.5 billion compared with 2022, according to a new CoinGecko report.

In a Jan. 17 report that looked at total activity across the crypto industry, CoinGecko shared that NFT trading volumes whipsawed throughout 2023.

After witnessing a large uptick in February, activity fell to a yearly low in September but experienced a rapid resurgence in the final quarter, largely thanks to elevated interest in Bitcoin Ordinals.

While Ethereum remained the preferred network of choice for NFT traders — capturing 72.3% of yearly volume — Bitcoin surpassed Ethereum in December, with $808 million in trading volume.

Mark Zuckerberg’s metaverse still a “decade” away

Mark Zuckberg’s Meta has no plans to stop investing in the metaverse despite it potentially taking more than 10 years to come to fruition, says a Meta executive.

Speaking at the World Economic Forum on Jan. 17, Meta’s head of global business, Nicola Mendelsohn, said that it may take a “good decade” to fully realize the company’s vision of an expansive metaverse.

“There was a lot of [metaverse] hype a couple of years ago, and we were always playing cautious here, telling people we still see that this is going to take a good decade to get to that full realized vision, and so we still see that we’re on that journey.”

Mark Zuckerberg made a similar comment in April 2022, saying it could take more than 10 years for his idea of the metaverse to be adopted by wider society.

Meta has burned more than $47 billion through Reality Labs since 2019, which is the division that houses the company’s virtual reality and metaverse operations, according to figures reported by Business Insider.

Other news

Former OpenSea product manager Nathaniel Chastain has appealed his conviction for wire fraud and money laundering related to insider trading. Chastain’s legal team argued that he was entitled to an acquittal because the U.S. government failed to prove that information related to NFTs on OpenSea qualified as property.

Elon Musk caused a stir with NFT enthusiasts when he removed support for NFT profile pictures on X. The social media platform introduced the feature on Jan. 20, 2022, allowing paid subscribers to link their NFTs to their Twitter profile pictures, turning their profile picture into a hexagon to show that it was an NFT.