Titanic NFTs are the latest symbol of Belfast’s troubled history
Near the shipyard that built the Titanic in Belfast, a giant mural pays tribute to history’s most famous ship and the 1,500 who perished on its maiden voyage in April 1912.
The town also has a Titanic museum, recently reopened after a £4.5 million upgrade. It displays poignant relics from the tragedy, including the violin played by bandleader Wallace Hartley when the ship went down and one of only six surviving deck chairs bearing the White Star Line’s logo.
But maybe you want a more personal connection — something that, to quote the song from the movie of the same name, goes “on and on.” If so, RMS Titanic Inc (RMST), the company with exclusive rights to the wreck that has lain on the North Atlantic seabed since it sank en route to New York on April 15 more than a century ago, has you covered: crypto collectibles.
History is everywhere in Northern Ireland, from the Titanic to the Troubles – the three decades of sectarian conflict that ended 25 years ago this Easter with the Good Friday Agreement, signed on 10 April 1998. Preservation of the past is taken seriously in a place where the future is often felt out of reach.
Crypto offers a way to keep Titanic alive from the 21st century. But some view RMST’s efforts to display non-fungible tokens, or NFTs—a blockchain instrument used to collect digital art—as both economically precarious and morally dubious. The company launched some NFTs last year with crypto platform Crypto.com, billing the venture as a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to collect these unique stories”.
RMST has now teamed up with two Hong Kong-based companies – virtual asset manager Venture Smart Financial Holdings and Artifact Labs, a firm with a self-proclaimed mission to “preserve and connect history on the blockchain” – to enable 5,500 artifacts. sold as tokens.
Details are few, but Artifact Labs also promises a decentralized autonomous organization for users to participate in future Titanic initiatives, including dives to the wreck site.
“In some ways, NFTs are like the Titanic,” says Robert Norton, CEO of Verisart, a platform that verifies the authenticity of digital assets. “They were a very big thing – but they completely collapsed.” NFTs had fallen around 90 percent in volume and value since the peak in 2021, he adds.
Should the public be able to own some kind of digital title to an object recovered from a wreck where so many lost their lives? Titanic Belfast, the museum, says it does not display anything from the seabed “mass grave” and only displays objects found on the surface.
Tom McCluskie, a former Harland & Wolff archivist who painstakingly preserved documents from the shipyard, is emphatic in his condemnation.
“Under international law and treaties, no one can ‘own’ any items removed from the wreck of the RMS Titanic, so what’s the point of ‘owning’ a false financial interest in such an item?” he says, blasting it as “vanity-driven” and the quest to recover even more items as “grave robbing”.
Titanic Belfast is even more repulsive. “There is no substitute for seeing the original pieces in real life,” said a spokesman, who called the city’s biggest tourist attraction “guardian of her [Titanic’s] truth”.
For Northern Ireland, created by the partition of Ireland a decade after the Titanic sank, preserving history and telling all sides’ truth is an ongoing challenge. The region remains divided by cultural and political divides and persistent paramilitary violence, though the decades of conflict between republicans aiming to remove British rule and loyalists fighting to keep it British are long gone.
Crypto can’t crack it, but old-school audio and video can preserve the feelings and emotions of a tangible link to Northern Ireland’s recent past.
For that I recommend Lost lives, an enchanting evocation of some of the 3,700 victims of the Troubles – from which the protagonists are eerily absent. And Lyraa fascinating film portrait of journalist Lyra McKee, shot and killed by dissident republicans in 2019, painstakingly stitched together from fragments of her taped voice and her writing.
