While countries like Ukraine have issued NFTs in the past, this particular announcement is somewhat different – for the first time, it comes from one of the highest levels of government in the UK. It is also supposed to be carried out by the body responsible for printing the country’s money. This does not mean that UK citizens should expect the government to replace the pound with HerMajesty’sCoin anytime soon. The complete lack of details in the announcement makes it easy to see it as just a public relations exercise – a way for the Treasury to show that it is really serious to make the UK a hotbed of economic innovation and to “get on the ground” with encryption ( you know, announcing an NFT over a year after the release of Taco Bell with its own crypto token). To be fair, it seems that the UK government is taking encryption seriously. Glenn announced that the Treasury Department is asking a legal task force to review the “legal status of decentralized autonomous agencies” (or DAOs). It also brings together a lot of what the government is currently working on on encryption – the talk takes 21 minutes (although there is plenty of volume) and you can watch the whole thing below. Reuters does a good job of allocating key data, but as TL; DR: the UK Treasury is working to regulate certain fixed currencies (cryptocurrencies whose value is, in theory, largely linked to the price of fiat currencies ) will have many meetings around setting up cryptocurrencies and is still working on the “regulatory sandbox” to allow cryptocurrencies to “test products and services in a controlled environment”. As for the Ministry of Finance encryption project, it is difficult to know what to expect. Will it be a collector’s item that cryptocurrency lovers across the UK will want to have in their wallet? Or will it just be an NFT (the announcement tweet somehow implies there will be only one) stored in a wallet locked in Buckingham Palace or the Tower of London? Honestly, this is probably not the important place. While NFTs are noisy (or at least were at one point), the future of encryption is likely to be shaped more by the way countries with a large share of global finance choose to regulate them rather than any specific project – even if this the project comes from the Royal Mint.
