Trump on track to earn more ETH passively than The Apprentice royalties

Say what you will about Trump. He (or his team) has figured out passive crypto income.

Vending machines, rental properties and affiliate marketing are usually the strategies of choice for passive income influencers.

Not Trump. The former president and second-term hopeful is benefitting from two distinct onchain phenomena: secondary NFT sales and, increasingly, token taxes paid by unofficial memecoins.

Over the weekend, Blockworks looked into Trump’s finances, thanks to some publicly released disclosures. The former president has $635 million in assets, hundreds of millions of dollars revenue from properties including Mar-a-Lago and various golf courses, and millions of dollars in royalties.

Read more: Memecoin taxes and NFT royalties are paying off for Trump

Part of those royalties were $7.2 million in licensing fees from NFT INT LLC, the company which licensed Trump’s likeness for the official Trump Digital Trading Card NFT collections on Polygon.

Much of Trump’s assets are meanwhile in US Treasurys and other bonds, reports CBS. There’s index funds and stocks, as well as 114.75 million shares in his media company DJT, currently worth $2.65 billion. The shares will be tradable in September, after a six-month lock-up period expires.

Read more: How US presidencies map to crypto markets

And then there’s a disclosure of between $1 million and $5 million ether, as well as between $100,000 and $250,000 in gold bars (Arkham Intelligence puts Trump’s ether holdings at $2.26 million). 

What isn’t represented granularly in the disclosure is that Trump’s crypto wallets (particularly on Ethereum and Polygon) are currently raking in tens of thousands of dollars every month through no continued effort of Trump’s team.

Blockchain data shows that Trump’s first three NFT collections altogether brought in up to 1,237 ETH in their respective first weeks, which would account for the initial drops. Based on the daily value of ETH, those sales would’ve brought in $2.14 million to Trump’s Polygon wallet, but the same amount of crypto would fetch almost $3.2 million today.

Trump Digital Trading Cards also carry a 10% royalty fee for secondary sales, and Trump’s Polygon wallet has received an additional 782.32 ETH ($2 million) outside of the initial collection sales, going back to January 2023. Perfectly decent passive income from Trump NFT traders.

But that NFT revenue is drying up and will likely continue to do so until we see a fourth drop (which Trump has hinted at). Trump’s wallet earns a few hundred dollars at best per day from NFT trades right now and often under $10.

Luckily, a raft of illegitimate memecoins on Ethereum are paying a steady stream of ether to Trump’s Ethereum wallet, as shown on the chart above.

Read more: Web3 Watch: A second Trump token fiasco

Save America, Trump Bucks and a few different “Trump Fund” coins pay a 2% auto-tax to Trump on every transfer, and so far those token contracts have paid over 5,100 individual donations (readers should be cautious about interacting with any of those tokens).

The donations are fractions of an ETH each, but they do add up: 137.3 ETH in the past four months, nearly $480,000 at the time of transaction and $354,000 at current prices. 

Over the same period, NFT royalties have earned Trump’s wallet about 4.5 ETH ($11,600 at current prices). Annualizing those combined comes to over 425 ETH, or $1.09 million today.

Not bad for sitting back and letting crypto do its thing. That’s over 10 times more than Trump’s pension from the Screen Actors Guild, and higher than his reported royalties from The Apprentice over the past year.

A modified version of this article first appeared in the daily Empire newsletter. Subscribe here so you don’t miss tomorrow’s edition.

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