When most people speak about passive income, it is related to things such as vending machines, rental properties, or even affiliate marketing. But in Trump's case, he has found another route to cashing in—secondary NFT sales, and, more recently, taxes from unofficial memecoins.
This weekend, we got the privilege of peeping through Trump's financial curtains: $635 million in assets, hundreds of millions in revenues from his properties, and millions in royalties.
Some of those royalties come from $7.2 million in licencing fees from NFT INT LLC, the company that used Trump's image for the official Trump Digital Trading Card NFTs on the Polygon blockchain.
The bulk of Trump's assets are in U.S. Treasury bonds, index funds, and stocks. He is also holding 114.75 million shares in his media company, DJT, which are worth $2.65 billion. Those shares will be tradable this September, once a six-month lock-up period ends.
On top of that, Trump revealed he held $1 million to $5 million in ether and $100,000 to $250,000 in gold bars. According to data from Arkham Intelligence, Trump's ether holdings are worth $1.28 million, while another $976,000 is held in WETH.
What is not clearly indicated on the disclosure is that Trump's crypto wallets, in particular on Ethereum and Polygon, have been raking in tens of thousands of dollars every month with no ongoing effort on the part of his team.
Blockchain data reveals Trump's first three NFT collections brought in up to 1,237 ETH in their first weeks. Based on the daily value of ETH at that time, those sales would have added $2.14 million to Trump's Polygon wallet. Today the same amount of crypto would be worth nearly $3.2 million. Royalty fees on secondary sales for Trump Digital Trading Cards are 10%, and Trump's Polygon wallet has already raked in an additional 782.32 ETH ($2 million) since January 2023. That is a nice stream of passive income resulting from Trump NFT traders.
However, the income from NFTs is surely slowing down and will continue to be that way until Trump decides to launch his fourth collection, for which hints have been dropped. Right now, Trump's wallet makes just a few hundred dollars per day off NFT trades, sometimes less than $10.
Fortunately, many unofficial memecoins on Ethereum are doling out a steady stream of ether to Trump's Ethereum wallet. Coins including Save America, Trump Bucks, and various 'Trump Fund' tokens have included a 2% auto-tax on every transfer, which is then sent to Trump's wallet. So far, these tokens have combined to make more than 5,100 individual payments.
These payouts are small fractions of an ETH, but they all add up: to 137.3 ETH in the past four months, or about $354,000 at today's prices. During that period, NFT royalties brought Trump's wallet about 4.5 ETH ($11,600).
It'll be interesting to see if Trump includes this unofficial memecoin tax revenue in his next financial disclosure. Really, that would be a sign of crypto adoption.
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