Non-fungible token (NFT) artworks portraying Queen Elizabeth II flooded the marketplace within minutes of the announcement of her death on Thursday in the U.K., with many people paying tribute to the longest reigning British monarch.
Popular NFT marketplace OpenSea has listed thousands of NFTs since the announcement, including photographs of Queen Elizabeth to art pieces associated with popular NFT collections.
RIP The Queen Official, for instance, has over 8,000 digital artworks and buyers can choose from different variations of pictures of the queen, who died aged 96 after reigning for 70 years as monarch.
A QueenE DAO Collection has seen a spike in demand and in prices of its NFTs, with 10 pieces sold in the last 10 hours, nine of which went for more than US$1,000. The previous last sale of the NFTs was 23 days ago at US$99.84.
“Rest in Ethereum, forever,” says QueenE DAO’s Twitter page.
The spike in sales follows a fall in the number of unique NFT buyers last month to less than 500,000 for the first time in a year, according to NFT aggregation site CryptoSlam. Total sales rose to US$730 million from July’s US$650 million, on the back of an increase in Ethereum prices in early August.
From “The London bridge has fallen,” to “wearing Queen Elizabeth dress and hat in her memory,” people also took to Twitter to pay their respects.
Pradipta Mukherjee is a business reporter and has worked for Bloomberg News and Business Standard in India. An MBA and a post-graduate in Economics, Mukherjee focuses on financial markets and corporates. She is a Mary Morgan Hewitt award recipient for Women in Journalism. She has also won the Jefferson Fellowship; the Thomson Reuters Foundation fellowship on ‘Social Media and Digital Journalism’ at The Chinese University of Hong Kong; and most recently, the Kiplinger Fellowship at Ohio University, USA.
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