It should be noted that Melania's connection to NFT tokens became known back in December 2021. Then the idea was also commented on by former US President Donald Trump. The politician said that "Melania will succeed", with the main reason being the former first lady's rich imagination. Read more about this in a separate article.


NFT token scandals

The auction itself was held on January 11. The buyer of the token was promised an image of “the iconic masterpiece white hat worn by Mrs Trump”. The starting price of the auction was the “equivalent” of $250,000 in Solana tokens, or about 1,800 SOL at the time. Part of the profits from the auction were to go towards “giving foster children access to computer science and technology”.

By the end of the auction, NFT had several buyers, with the token going to the winning bidder for the same $1,800 SOL, which was already the equivalent of $170,000 at the end of the auction. Who was the buyer? According to the data on the blockchain, it was Melania Trump herself, or at least the person who produced the token. The thing is, the purchase was made from the same address that issued the NFT.

Melania Trump’s NFT

This information was published by Motherboard. A little later, Melania Trump’s representatives reached out to reporters with the following statement.

The nature of blockchain is completely transparent. Therefore, anyone can see the transaction. The transaction itself was conducted on behalf of a third-party buyer.

Melania Trump during an official visit in 2018

In other words, the payment for the token was allegedly made by a third-party buyer, but in order to conceal its identity on the blockchain, the purchase was made from the same address that issued the tokens. Melania Trump’s representatives have also not revealed the real identity of the new NFT owner.

According to Melania Trump’s website, the cryptocurrency wallet address of the auction winner can be found at this link. Overall, the entire purchase process can be broken down into several stages.

• The auction winner’s address received 1800 SOL on 25 January;
• These coins came from another address – let’s call it “address X”;
• This address received the coins from the wallet that issued the token;
• After the auction, the NFT creator address sent the 1800 SOL back to address X, which converted them into USDC stabelcoin, which is a cryptocurrency with a peg to the US dollar.

NFT information from Melania Trump’s official website

In other words, the winner of the auction received the money from none other than the creator of NFT itself, and the address associated with the creator of NFT returned the money. The only real possibility – assuming the story about the mystery buyer is true – is that the buyer used fiat instead of cryptocurrencies, and “for the public” the entire transaction was conducted on Melania Trump coins.

According to VICE journalists, it is likely that the aim of the auction was the aforementioned dollar minimum, i.e. the very 250,000. But because the price of Solana dropped significantly in January, the minimum bid of 1,800 SOL no longer met these requirements. So the buyer may have paid for all or part of the deal in dollars.


We think this situation was strange. Of course, the option with an anonymous buyer may be real, but the willingness of the NFT collection authors to pay for the work with their own cryptocurrency seems implausible. Finally, in this case, one could simply use a third-party wallet to get rid of suspicions and unnecessary questions from the cryptocurrency community. In the meantime, it seems that NFT's creators were caught in the act some time after the auction, which gave birth to the mystery-buyer version.