The UK government has abandoned its plans to produce a non-fungible token for sale through the Royal Mint, just under a year after it first announced the project.
Responding to a question from Conservative MP Harriett Baldwin, Treasury Economic Secretary Andrew Griffith confirmed the abandonment, saying: “In consultation with HM Treasury, the Royal Mint is not proceeding with a non-fungible token launch at this time. . but I will keep this proposal under review.”
Tulip Siddiq, the shadow City minister, welcomed the decision. “I’m glad the Royal Mint has finally made sense to the Conservatives, but we’ve been calling on the chancellor to drop this crypto gimmick for months,” he said.
“This out of touch government should focus on the cost of living crisis, not waste taxpayer time and money on an NFT vanity project and promote dubious stablecoins.”
In April 2022, the Treasury had asked the Mint to create the token. At the time, he said that it “shows the forward-looking approach we are determined to take with regards to 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, nor 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-foreign minister Rishi Sunak, came a few weeks before the bubble burst, and within a month, the Treasury had to defend its plans against the collapse in value of all cryptocurrencies after the failure. of Terra/UST’s “algorithmic stablecoin.”
Since then, a slow-motion crisis has engulfed the sector, with FTX, Celsius, Voyager and Genesis filing for bankruptcy along with crypto-focused banks Silvergate and Signature and major crypto exchange Binance, facing an investigation by US regulators. .
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In his time as chancellor, Sunak positioned the UK government firmly behind cryptocurrencies and launched a task force in 2021 to investigate whether the Bank of England should create a “central bank digital 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 crash means that the most important project actually completed by the Treasury has been a very different look at the sector: a May 2022 consultation on managing the crypto bankruptcy. In it, the Treasury proposed new regulations to protect holders of “stablecoins” like UST, treating digital currencies more like a bank than a payment service. “The failure of a system [cryptocurrency] the company could have a wide range of financial stability as well as consumer protection impacts,” Treasury said.
