MoonPay and Solana Labs stress that they did not seek NFT partnership with Melania Trump

NFTs • December 16, 2021, 6:09PM EST
The Block

Former first lady Melania Trump announced her new non-fungible token (NFT) platform and stated that she would be using the Solana blockchain and the payment services of the crypto payment infrastructure startup MoonPay. 

Both companies quickly clarified that they were not, in fact, partners with Trump — nor that they sought out any involvement with the former first lady. 

“I wanted to inform you, to avoid any confusion, that her choice to use the Solana blockchain was completely organic and this project is not part of any Solana-led initiative,” a Solana representative wrote in an emailed statement. Decrypt first reported on the Solana Labs statement.

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Solana is a proof-of-stake powered blockchain that’s been gaining in popularity over the past few months as Ethereum – still the most popular blockchain for NFTs – maintains inaccessibly high transaction fees. 

As The Block previously reported, a representative from MoonPay, a UK-based firm that has been helping celebrities get into NFTs, said that “it is not possible to make credit card payments through MoonPay to purchase Melania Trump’s NFT collection.”

Further, “MoonPay has no official role in the effort,” the company tweeted.

Image Credit: MaciejGillert / Shutterstock.com

About Author

MK Manoylov has been a reporter for The Block since 2020 — joining just before bitcoin surpassed $20,000 for the first time. Since then, MK has written nearly 1,000 articles for the publication, covering any and all crypto news but with a penchant toward NFT, metaverse, web3 gaming, funding, crime, hack and crypto ecosystem stories. MK holds a graduate degree from New York University's Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program (SHERP) and has also covered health topics for WebMD and Insider. You can follow MK on X @MManoylov and on LinkedIn.