TECH: The UK will create an official NFT.

The UK wants to show that it’s embrac­ing cryp­to, and that includes dig­i­tal tokens — whether you like them or not. Chan­cel­lor of the Exche­quer Richi Sunak has bla­zoned that the Roy­al Mint will issue an offi­cial NFT even­tu­al­ly this sum­mer. Fur­ther details are not yet avail­able but Eco­nom­ic Sec­re­tary John Glen billed the token as a sym­bol of the” for­ward- look­ing approach“the coun­try was tak­ing toward cryp­to technologies.

The NFT will come as part of a broad­er work to sup­port finan­cial tech­nol­o­gy, and cryp­to in par­tic­u­lar. The UK gov­ern­ment aims to cre­ate a” dynam­ic reg­u­la­to­ry landscape“that wel­comes the tech­nol­o­gy, accord­ing to Glen. It now plans leg­is­la­tion that will drink sta­ble­coins into the coun­try’s pay­ment struc­ture, will pound the legal sta­tus of Decen­tral­ized Autonomous Orga­ni­za­tions (DAOs) and hopes to remove“disincentives“to invest­ment funds that involve crypto.

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The Finan­cial Con­duct Author­i­ty has for­mer­ly been exper­i­ment­ing through a reg­u­la­to­ry sand­box, and plans its first in a series of policy“crypto-sprints“this May. The gov­ern­ment is also form­ing a Cryp­toas­set Engage­ment Group that includes rep­re­sen­ta­tives from the FCA, Bank of Eng­land and busi­ness, with as numer­ous as eight meet­ings per time.

Glen was appre­hen­sive of the con­cerns cir­cling cryp­to, sim­i­lar as the even­tu­al­i­ty for scams, boot­leg activ­i­ty and envi­ron­men­tal dam­ages. Still, he cast the NFT and anal­o­gous sys­tems as an occa­sion to get“in on the ground floor“and thrive should cryp­to take off.
The NFT will not exhil­a­ra­tion crit­ics who see the tokens as cre­at­ing arti­fi­cial fail­ure, adding emis­sions or else wast­ing resources. Still, it’ll ges­ture the UK gov­ern­men­t’s good­will to court the cryp­to dili­gence. The coun­try is eas­i­ly ear­ly to recre­ate its char­ac­ter as a fis­cal cen­tral in the dig­i­tal realm.