In the hours following the death of Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom, many people are glued to the television watching the news. However, for others, this will always be an opportunity to make money. Within hours, several NFT collections ‘dedicated to the Queen’ emerged, and many in the NFT community raised questions about the ethics of doing so.
Among these collections are RIP The Queen Official, Long Live The Queen, King Charles and even the Queen Elizabeth Yacht Club collection.
Queen NFT collections have divided the Twitter community.
As soon as news of Her Majesty’s death broke yesterday, the NFT Twitter community knew what was coming. One user @ThreadGirl_eth said, “Makes a bag to throw away the first Queen nft collection,” while @zscuffed replied, “Yes, the Queen of England is dead. No, you shouldn’t make an NFT collection about it.”
However, before you could say ‘God Save the Queen’, many NFT projects were livestreaming and tweeting about it. Most of the projects use the image of the queen in some form and are made very hastily. Obviously, not everyone is impressed with the collection. Many people think this is profit from the Queen’s death and give NFTs a bad name.
One NFT set that caught Twitter’s attention was a free-to-mint poorly drawn Queen Elizabeth Yacht Club. One particular NFT image is that of the Queen’s knight, Captain Sir Thomas Moore. The tweet had over 1000 comments, nearly 1500 RTs and 2000 likes.
Popular NFT Tweeter @NFTherder said, “Dude did a “RIP The Queen” nft collection. Can’t wait one day, huh? That’s why people hate NFTs.”
RIP Queen Who buys NFTs?
Surprisingly, very few of these NFTS were sold or manufactured. @sensorbotNFT, which records NFT trading activity for over 30 minutes, had some interesting data in the following hours.
A 30-minute period had 3 queen-related NFTs in 5 NFT set sales. Long live the Queen had 762 minutes in 30 minutes, RIP Queen Elizabeth II had 347 minutes, and King Charles had 170 minutes.
Together, this is over 1000 Queen NFTs and proves that there was interest in these NFTs. Some people collect notes of important events in traditional forms such as newspapers. Perhaps this is a new digital way for people to remember events.
Use NFTs for good reasons
Not every NFT collection is about profit. In the past year, we have seen NFTs become a helpful tool to help people. For example, tens of millions of dollars were raised for Ukraine by the NFT community for International Women’s Day and children in need.
NFT philanthropy is a completely new way to deliver philanthropy, and we’ve seen it in action. But, this is just the beginning, and who knows how this will change in the future.
As the various Queen NFT collections show, there are plenty of opportunists out there. However, with some of these free-to-mint and highly engaged, we see a new way to identify historic moments. Only time will tell, but right now Twitter is divided about the ethics of these NFT collections.
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This article is educational material.
As always, do your own research before making any investment.