Crypto enthusiasts look to cash in on Queen’s death
A variety of royally themed NFTs, memecoins and Web 3 paraphernalia flooded NFT marketplaces and exchanges following the death of Queen Elizabeth II.
As Britain mourns the loss of its 96-year-old monarch, Web 3 enthusiasts took advantage of the global attention to launch a dizzying array of algorithmically generated, queen-themed, non-fungible tokens, as well as a number of cryptocurrency tokens such as Queen Elizabeth Inu, QueenDoge and London Bridge are down on Binance Smart Chain and Ethereum.
Queen Elizabeth Inu amassed 28,506% on PancakeSwap, with $17,000 in liquidity at the time of writing. Another token, Elizabeth, increased 8,000% with $204,000 in liquidity.
This comes somewhat ironically as Britain prepares to rebrand its money with the image of the succeeding monarch, King Charles III. Around 29 billion British coins and over four billion notes will have to be changed by the Royal Mint and the Bank of England respectively. The new monarch will face the Queen in a long-standing British tradition to signal the start of a new era.
Cryptoqueen NFT, anyone?
Following the algorithmic tradition of blue-chip NFT collection CryptoPunks, a collection called RIP The Queen Official, with over 8,000 images, was listed on OpenSea. Each algorithmically generated image contained slightly different renderings of the queen’s eyes and mouth.
Another collection, QueenE, developed by Fabio Seva and the holder of the maladen.eth ENS domain in July 2022 so that the auction of their seventy-third queen NFT would be the last. The couple had planned to make NFTs of the Queen for as long as she lived. The purported final NFT was sold for 2.73 ETH, followed by a surprise NFT auction of the queen’s likeness superimposed on a skeleton.
Another pump-and-dump?
It remains to be seen whether the cryptocurrencies have real support or are just another pump-and-dump scheme that lost investors over $2.8 billion in 2021, according to Chainalysis. Pump-and-dump schemes gain traction through deceptive campaigns that inflate the price of a cryptocurrency, after which promoters sell the coins or tokens, causing retail investors to lose large amounts of money.
In January 2022, victims of a pump-and-dump scheme promoted by Kim Kardashian and Floyd Mayweather filed a class-action lawsuit against the pair for promoting EthereumMax, a cryptocurrency unrelated to Ethereum.
One Reddit user wrote of the new queen-themed coins that “callous” greed strikes again. Meanwhile, another joked that central banks should be afraid of “ElizabethMoonCorgiRocketCoin.”
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