Nifty News: NFTs for Trump-haters, carbon offsets, fractionalized CryptoPunks and more

Hit Trump where it hurts by buying his Tweets to help out charities, a new scheme to enable NFT purchasers to offset carbon emissions, and get yourself a piece of a Punk.

A group of anon uni students has come up with a way to hit former President Donald Trump where it hurts: by using his Tweets against him to raise money for charities they believe he “despises.”

‘Strategic Meme Group Incorporated’ has set up the website Drumpfs.io to sell Trump’s tweets, at least as recorded by the Trump Twitter Archive. However, there’s no digital certificate of authenticity and the legal status of “ownership” of Tweets outside of the Twitter platform is dubious to non-existent. One hundred of Trump’s most infamous Tweets are selling for 4.5 ETH each, while regular missives from the former Leader of the Free World change hands for 0.0232 Ether.

Around 97% of the money raised will be donated to Americares, Clean Air Task Force, ACLU, Southern Poverty Law Center, Doctors Without Borders, and NAACP, while the rest will fund overheads. Drumpfs can be resold on secondary platforms.

Carbon offsets for NFTs

NFTs have become an unlikely poster child for ruining the environment, ahead of other candidates like international flights, heavy industry and car commuters. Various estimates suggest OpenSea is responsible for a cumulative 67.8 million kilograms of carbon emissions, while the recent NFT drop from musical act The Weeknd apparently emitted more carbon than a plane flying from New York to London 86 times.

Environmentally conscious NFT purchasers can now paste in the address of an NFT drop into the Aerial platform and it’ll tell you how many carbon credits you need to buy from them to balance the scales. You can pay with either USD — or weirdly enough, Ethereum — a payment which itself presumably requires additional carbon credits.  Aerial co-founder Andreas Homer said: 

“We really want to shed light on the environmental consequences of blockchain transactions, and give people those ways to mitigate them through carbon offsets.”

CryptoPunks go to pieces

CryptoPunks are among the earliest, and consequently most valuable, NFTs on the Ethereum blockchain — with individual punks selling for more than $7 million each. In other words, most of us can’t afford one to hang in the digital pool room. The Unicly CryptoPunks Collection (uPUNK) will offer 250 million fractional shares in a collection of 50 CryptoPunks. It’s the largest collection of Punks to be tokenized so far (but it’s not the first attempt to do so).

At present, 80 investors have created 3.6 million shares at 5 cents each. While there’s growing interest in fractionalizing high value NFT collections, SEC Commissioner Hester Pierce has warned such tokens could run afoul of securities laws.

50 CryptoPunks have been fractionalized into uPUNK on Unicly.

This is the largest fractionalize CryptoPunks collection ever!

Now, NFT lovers can buy CryptoPunk NFTs without having to buy the whole NFT.https://t.co/bK5fZkwtfr pic.twitter.com/LYQy4rXEuy

— Leia Fisher (@0xLeia) April 21, 2021

Drop it like it’s Dogg

When he’s not flogging food delivery services like Menulog in Australia (“chicken wings to the crib“) Snoop Dogg can be found toiling away in the NFT mines. He dropped an NFT collection on OpenSea on 4/20 (a day sacred among smokers) in collaboration with the artist behind the Nyan Cat meme. “Nyan Dogg”, which is pretty much exactly the same thing but with a dog, sold for a little over 14.2 ETH.

Meme based NFTs are hot property right now with the ‘Overly Attached Girlfriend’ NFT selling recently for $411K and ‘Bad Luck Brian’ selling for $36K. LA Mag notes that NFTs are finally allowing meme creators to profit from their work.