UK government drops plans for NFT made by Royal Mint | Non-fungible tokens (NFTs)

The UK government has dropped its plans to produce a non-fungible token for sale through the Royal Mint, just under a year after first announcing the project.

In response to a question from Conservative MP Harriett Baldwin, the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s Economic Secretary, Andrew Griffith, confirmed the termination, saying: “In consultation with HM Treasury, the Royal Mint is not proceeding with the launch of a non-fungible token at this time. time, but will keep this proposal under consideration.”

Tulip Siddiq, the shadow city minister, welcomed the decision. “I’m delighted that the Royal Mint has finally made the Conservatives see sense, but we’ve been asking the Chancellor to drop this crypto gimmick for months,” she said.

“This out-of-date government should focus on the cost of living crisis, not waste time and taxpayers’ money on an NFT vanity project promoting dubious stablecoins.”

In April 2022, the Treasury had asked the mint to create the token. At the time, it said it “demonstrates 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 visualization 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, by then Chancellor Rishi Sunak, came just weeks before the bubble popped, and within a month the Treasury had to defend its plans in the face of a collapse in value for all cryptocurrencies following the failure of the Terra/UST “algorithmic stablecoin”.

Since then, a slow-motion crisis has engulfed the sector, with FTX, Celsius, Voyager and Genesis filing for bankruptcy alongside crypto-focused banks Silvergate and Signature and Binance, the leading crypto exchange, facing an investigation by US regulators.

During his time as chancellor, Sunak positioned the UK government behind cryptocurrencies, launching a taskforce in 2021 to investigate whether the Bank of England should create a “digital central bank currency”. He described the plan as one “for a more open, greener and more technologically advanced financial services sector. The UK is already known for being at the forefront of innovation, but we need to go further.”

But the crypto collapse means the most important project actually completed by the Treasury has been a completely different look at the sector: a May 2022 consultation on dealing with cryptocurrency failures. In it, the Treasury proposed new regulations to protect the holders of “stablecoins” such as UST, treating the digital currencies more like a bank than a payment service. “The failure of a systemic [cryptocurrency] a firm can have a wide range of financial stability as well as consumer protection effects,” the Treasury Department said.