Trump's former lawyer Michael Cohen is making NFTs out of his prison badge
- Donald Trump's former personal lawyer Michael Cohen is diving into the NFT market.
- Cohen will sell NFTs featuring his badge from federal prison and will auction an NFT backed by a handwritten page from his memoir.
Michael Cohen, who was Donald Trump's personal attorney for more than a decade, is getting into the booming NFT market by selling digital representations of the badge he wore in federal prison while serving time for tax evasion and other crimes.
A statement about Cohen's venture into the world of nonfungible tokens arrived a little more than a week after Cohen was officially released from his three-year prison sentence. Cohen is working with ArtGrails, an NFT platform that will host his auction.
Cohen's collection will include a set of NFTs of his badge from Otisville Prison in New York. The badge NFTs will be sold at a fixed price on the platform on December 12. Cohen reported to the Otisville Prison in May 2019 after pleading guilty in 2018 to charges including campaign finance violations and evading taxes on more than $4 million in personal income from the IRS.
An NFT that will go up for bid on Wednesday features a handwritten page from Cohen's 2020 memoir "Disloyal". He wrote the page while serving the first days at Otisville. "Disloyal," a recounting of his time as Trump's so-called "fixer" was published in 2020. The NFT was set to be displayed at Miami Arti week from Wednesday through December 12.
The NFT also includes a never-before-seen video of Cohen writing the first pages of the memoir from his holding cell. The auction winner will receive the original manuscript and the video NFT. ArtGrails said the video was filmed by an unnamed colleague of Cohen's just before Cohen was released from Otisville to serve the rest of his term from his Park Avenue apartment.
"Integrating an NFT into the release of these one-of-a-kind physical items not only validates them using blockchain technology, but it also gave us the ability to incorporate some creativity into the release," ArtGrails founder Avery Andon said in the statement.
Cohen on November 22 was released from his sentence after spending 18 months of it under house arrest in Manhattan. He now joins a slew of high-profile people and companies releasing NFTs in what's grown into a hot segment of the broader $1.1 trillion cryptocurrency market. The NFT world has had a notable 2021 highlighted in part by the record $69 million sale in March of a digital collection of work from an artist known as Beeple.
Cohen told reporters last week he's under three years of supervised release.