Following the announcement of the passing of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, NFT creators have rushed to immortalise the memory of the late monarch by minting artworks of her on the blockchain.
Proving once again that crypto never sleeps, a collection titled RIP The Queen Official saw 8000 algorithmically generated artworks of the Queen uploaded to OpenSea within an hour of the BBC’s statement regarding her death.
Depictions of the heavily pixelated Queen Elizabeth II included a variety of different traits with varying degrees of palatability. Some of the traits depicted her with ‘little wings’ and a crown, while others made references to themes prevalent in the crypto world, such as laser eyes and the blue bird from the Twitter logo.
While prices for Queen Elizabeth II-related NFTs are spiking elsewhere, so far this collection has only traded 1.1 ETH (US$2,651) worth of volume.
More notably, a pre-existing and far more respectful NFT collection dedicated to preserving the memory of Queen Elizabeth II on the blockchain has seen the highest amount of price activity, with a current floor price of 0.7ETH.
The QueenE Collection, which hadn’t seen a sale for more than three weeks, has now sold more than 10 pieces in the last six hours. NFTs that were selling for an average of 0.06ETH ($US95) a few weeks ago are now changing hands for 0.7ETH (US$1,100) a pop — a 1100% profit margin for holders.
Critics watching on from outside the crypto space have been quick to criticise the opportunism, while big personalities on Crypto Twitter have also taken aim at the lack of tastefulness of these artworks.
While many throughout the NFT community were rushing to capitalise on the late Queen’s passing, major commentators in the space weren’t so supportive of the hustle, with threadguy.eth condemning the opportunists to his 81,000 Twitter followers.
Although the prickly opportunism of many NFT creators here is palpable, these flash projects aren’t actually witnessing much in the way of price action. Projects like QueenE, that were created for the sole purpose of preserving the memory of Britain’s longest-reigning monarch on the blockchain, are the ones receiving the most financial attention.
