UK government drops plans for NFT made by Royal Mint
The UK government has dropped its plans to produce a non-fungible token for sale through the Royal Mint, just under a year after it first announced the project.
In response to a question from the Conservative MP Harriett Baldwin, the Treasury’s economic secretary, Andrew Griffith, confirmed the abandonment, saying: “In consultation with HM Treasury, the Royal Mint is not proceeding with the launch of a non-fungible token at this time but will keep this proposal under review.”
Tulip Siddiq, the shadow City minister, welcomed the decision. “I’m glad that the Royal Mint has finally made the Conservatives see sense, but we’ve been calling on the chancellor to drop this crypto gimmick for months,” she said.
“This out-of-touch government should be focused on the cost of living crisis, not wasting time and taxpayers’ money on an NFT vanity project and promoting dodgy stablecoins.”
In April 2022, the Treasury had asked the Mint to create the token. At the time, it said it “shows the forward-looking approach we are determined to take towards crypto assets in the UK”.
There is little to show for almost 12 months of work. The Mint did not produce a visualisation of what the proposed non-fungible token would look like, or any technical explanation of how it would work, what it would offer users, and what blockchain infrastructure it would be built on.
The announcement of an NFT, from the then chancellor, Rishi Sunak, came just weeks before the bubble popped, and within a month, the Treasury was having to defend its plans in the face of a collapse in value of all cryptocurrencies after the failure of the Terra/UST “algorithmic stablecoin”.
Since then, a slow-motion crisis has embroiled the sector, with FTX, Celsius, Voyager and Genesis
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