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The Treasury of Her Majesty is developing a new type of mint – NFTs

The United Kingdom’s Treasury Minister has tasked the Royal Mint with developing an NFT as “an icon of Her Majesty’s Treasury’s forward-thinking approach” to cryptocurrencies and blockchains. The initiative was unveiled in a speech by John Glen, the Treasury’s Economic Secretary, who stated during a summit that additional information about the mint’s mint would be forthcoming “very soon.”

While countries such as Ukraine have previously issued NFTs, this news feels unique for a number of reasons. For one thing, it comes from one of the highest levels of the British government. Additionally, it is supposed to be carried out by the body responsible for printing the country’s currency.

That is not to claim that the UK government will soon replace the pound with HerMajesty’sCoin. Due to the announcement’s complete lack of facts, it’s easy to dismiss it as a public relations stunt — a way for the Treasury to demonstrate its commitment to establishing the UK as a hotspot of financial innovation and getting “in on the ground floor” with cryptocurrency.

To be fair, it appears as though the UK government is serious about crypto. Glen revealed that the Treasury Department has established a legal task force to examine the “legal status of decentralised autonomous entities” (or DAOs).

It’s difficult to predict what the treasury’s crypto project will include. Is it a collectible item that crypto lovers in the United Kingdom will want to keep in their wallets? Or will it be a single NFT (as implied by the announcement tweet), held on a hardware wallet locked away at Buckingham Palace or the Tower of London?

To be honest, that is probably not the most critical element. While NFTs are trendy (or were at one point), the future of crypto is likely to be determined more by how countries with a significant stake in global finance choose to regulate them than by any individual project — even if it is from the Royal Mint.