In less than a year since it initially announced the idea, the UK government has abandoned its plans to create a non-fungible token for sale through the Royal Mint, Entrepreneurng report.
The Royal Mint has decided not to introduce a non-fungible token at this time but will keep this concept under evaluation, according to HM Treasury and the Treasury’s economic secretary, Andrew Griffith, in answer to a question from Conservative MP Harriett Baldwin.
The shadow minister for the City, Tulip Siddiq, praised the choice. She said, “We’ve been asking the chancellor to reject this crypto nonsense for months. I’m happy that the Royal Mint has finally made the Conservatives see sense.
The Treasury had requested the Mint to make the token in April 2022. When it was first announced, it was noted that it “shows the forward-looking approach are determined to take towards crypto assets in the UK.”
For nearly a year of labor, there is not much to show. The Mint did not provide a visual representation of the planned non-fungible coin, a technical description of how it would operate, a list of its benefits to users, or the foundation upon which the blockchain infrastructure would be built.
Just a few weeks before the bubble burst, the then-chancellor Rishi Sunak announced an NFT. Within a month, the Treasury had to defend its plans after all cryptocurrencies experienced a decline in value due to the failure of the Terra/UST “algorithmic stablecoin.”
Since then, the industry has been engulfed in a slow-motion crisis, with FTX, Celsius, Voyager, and Genesis declaring bankruptcy, along with the crypto-focused banks Silvergate and Signature, and Binance, the top cryptocurrency exchange, being the subject of a US regulatory probe.
Sunak established the UK government’s strong support for cryptocurrencies during his tenure as chancellor. In 2021, he established a task force to examine whether the Bank of England should establish a “central bank digital currency.”
“For a more open, greener, and technologically advanced financial services sector,” he said of the initiative. Although the UK is already recognized for being at the forefront of innovation, we must do more.”
Conclusion
Yet, the cryptocurrency crash means that the Treasury’s most significant effort has been a different analysis of the industry: a May 2022 consultation on managing the failure of cryptocurrencies.
In it, the Treasury recommended new rules that would treat virtual currencies more like banks than payment services to protect the owners of “stablecoins” like UST. The Treasury warned that “the collapse of a systemic [cryptocurrency] firm might have a wide range of financial stability as well as consumer protection implications.
Source: The Guardian
