Some Reddit users accused those launching new coins of being insensitive.
A plethora of royal-themed NFTs, meme cryptocurrencies, and Web 3.0 paraphernalia flooded NFT markets and exchanges following the death of Queen Elizabeth II.
As the UK mourns the loss of its 96-year-old monarch, Web 3.0 enthusiasts capitalized on global attention to launch a dizzying array of algorithmically generated “Queen”-themed non-fungible tokens (NFTs), as well as a host of cryptocurrency tokens such as “Queen Elizabeth. Inu”, “QueenDoge” and “London Bridge is down” on Binance Smart Chain and Ethereum.
Queen Elizabeth Inu rallied 28,506% on PancakeSwap, with $17,000 in liquidity at the time of writing. Another token, “Elizabeth”, is up 8,000% on $204,000 in liquidity.
This is somewhat ironic, as the UK prepares to rename its money after the image of the successor monarch, King Charles III. The Royal Mint and the Bank of England will have to exchange some 29 billion British coins and more than 4 billion notes, respectively.
The changes are going to leave Britons and tourists doing a double-take for a while.
The new monarch will face off against the queen in a long-standing British tradition to signal the dawn of a new era.
Other changes will be far slower, including the small matter of the coins and banknotes with the queen’s face. The Royal Mint, which produces the coins, and the Bank of England, which oversees the notes, will phase in new bills and coins adorned with King Charles, but that could take months and even years: The government is in the final throes of phasing out paper bills in favor of longer-lasting polymer notes.
Cryptoqueen NFT, anyone?
Following the algorithmic tradition of the top-tier CryptoPunks NFT collection, a collection called RIP The Queen Official, with over 8,000 images, was listed on OpenSea. Each algorithmically generated image contained slightly different representations of the queen’s eyes and mouth.
Another collection, QueenE, started by Fabio Seva and owner of the maladen.eth ENS domain in July 2022, said that the auction of its 73rd NFT queen would be its last. The pair had planned to create NFTs of the queen while she was alive. The final supposed NFT was sold for 2.73 ETH, followed by a surprise NFT auction of the image of the queen imposed on a skeleton.
Another Pump and Dump?
It remains to be seen whether cryptocurrencies have genuine backing or are just another one of the pump-and-dump schemes that lost investors more than $2.8 billion in 2021, according to Chainalysis.
Pump and dump schemes gain traction through deceptive promotions that cause the price of a cryptocurrency to rise, after which the 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.
Kardashian caused a stir last year when she made an Instagram post promoting the EthereumMax token. “Are you guys into crypto????” Kardashian wrote. “This is not financial advice but sharing what my friends just told me about the Ethereum Max token!”
One Reddit user wrote about the new queen-themed coins that “insensitive” greed strikes again. At the same time, another joked that central banks should be afraid of “ElizabethMoonCorgiRocketCoin”.
By Audy Castaneda
