Trump NFTs pump after indictment, Q1 trading volume hits $4.7B and more…

Odd­ly, fol­low­ing news of a New York Grand Jury vot­ing to indict for­mer pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump on March 30, the floor price for the offi­cial­ly licensed Trump Dig­i­tal Trad­ing Cards NFT project pumped. 

Accord­ing to data from OpenSea, NFT traders were seem­ing­ly spurred into action by the announce­ment, with the floor price mov­ing from 0.46 Ether (ETH) or $835 at cur­rent prices, to as high as 0.6 ETH ($1090) on the same day. 

It is worth not­ing that when the project launched in Decem­ber, it offered exclu­sive one-on-one expe­ri­ences to cer­tain NFT hodlers, such as pri­vate golf ses­sions, din­ners and con­ver­sa­tions with Trump. 

Giv­en the indict­ment news, it could poten­tial­ly have an impact on the forty-fifth’s poten­tial to deliv­er on such experiences. 

At the time of writ­ing, the floor price has since dropped back to around the 0.51 range. The price still sits well above the ini­tial mint price of $99 from December. 

NFT sales hit $4.7B in Q1

Accord­ing to a March 30 report from blockchain ana­lyt­ics plat­form Dap­pRadar, there was a total of $4.7 bil­lion worth of NFT trad­ing vol­ume in Q1, more than dou­ble that of the pre­vi­ous quarter. 

The firm point­ed to bull­ish action com­ing from the Blur mar­ket­place in par­tic­u­lar, which took the mar­ket by storm in Feb­ru­ary dur­ing its token air­drop farm­ing period. 

The $4.7 bil­lion came from a total of 19.4 mil­lion NFT sales in Q1, mark­ing an increase of 8.56%, while total vol­ume increased by 147% com­pared to the $1.9 bil­lion post­ed in Q4 2022. 

The Ethereum net­work account­ed for a whop­ping $4.1 bil­lion worth of the vol­ume, with sec­ond-placed Solana con­tribut­ing $242 mil­lion, while Poly­gon notably ranked third with $85 mil­lion for the quarter. 

Square Enix drops Final Fan­ta­sy NFT trad­ing cards

Square Enix, the Japan­ese gam­ing giant behind the wide­ly pop­u­lar Final Fan­ta­sy fran­chise, has released NFT trad­ing cards in cel­e­bra­tion of the twen­ty-fifth anniver­sary of Final Fan­ta­sy VII. 

The NFTs come as part of the Final Fan­ta­sy VII Anniver­sary Art Muse­um Dig­i­tal Card Plus col­lec­tion, which fea­tures five phys­i­cal cards and a sixth dig­i­tal NFT card. 

How­ev­er, despite being called trad­ing cards, Square Enix stat­ed on its web­site that the NFTs can’t actu­al­ly be trad­ed or trans­ferred at this stage, unless the com­pa­ny decides to build a mar­ket­place in the future. 

“If we decide to sup­port the mar­ket­place in the future, we will noti­fy you,” the web­site reads. 

The packs were dropped on March 31 and cost around $3.30 a pop, with the card art­work depict­ing var­i­ous char­ac­ters and scenery from the icon­ic Final Fan­ta­sy VII game. 

While it is unclear if the firm intends to build a mar­ket­place to sup­port its dig­i­tal col­lectibles, Square Enix has been grad­u­al­ly ramp­ing up its NFT and blockchain gam­ing-relat­ed ini­tia­tives over the past cou­ple of years, sug­gest­ing some­thing could be in the works. 

NFT flight tickets

Low-cost Argen­tinean air­line Fly­bon­di has launched domes­tic NFT flight tick­ets under an ini­tia­tive called “Tick­et 3.0.”

Accord­ing to a rough trans­la­tion of a March 29 announce­ment from the firm, users of the new ser­vice will be able to direct­ly change names on the tick­ets, trans­fer them to oth­er peo­ple, or give them away, essen­tial­ly stream­lin­ing the firm’s cur­rent tick­et­ing models. 

“With Tick­et 3.0, our pas­sen­gers will have greater flex­i­bil­i­ty and con­trol over their trips because they will be able to trans­fer, rename or give away their tick­ets in a sim­ple and autonomous way,” not­ed Fly­bon­di CEO Mauri­cio Sana, adding that: 

“With this launch, we seek to gen­er­ate a pos­i­tive impact in the avi­a­tion indus­try through inno­va­tion and an appli­ca­tion of blockchain technology.”

The move comes as part of an expand­ed part­ner­ship with NFT tick­et­ing com­pa­ny Trav­elX, which launched late last year and uti­lizes the Algo­rand blockchain for its tokenization. 

Other Nifty News:

Wak­weli, a Web3 infra­struc­ture pro­to­col that issues cer­tifi­cates of authen­tic­i­ty, has offi­cial­ly part­nered with layer‑2 scal­ing plat­form Poly­gon to make NFT authen­ti­ca­tion possible.

On March 27, Unit­ed States-based tick­et­ing com­pa­ny Tick­et­mas­ter announced a new fea­ture — token-gat­ed tick­et sales — allow­ing artists to reward NFT hold­ers with exclu­sive ben­e­fits, includ­ing “spe­cial pre­sales, prime seats, cus­tom trav­el pack­ages and access to unique con­cert experiences.”