As soon as Buckingham Palace told the world that Queen Elizabeth II had died, crypto gamblers, NFT sellers, and Web3 fans moved quickly to make money off of the world's attention.
Around 6:30 p.m. in London, when her death was officially announced, OpenSea and crypto exchanges were flooded with thousands of new Queen-themed non-fungible token (NFT) artworks and a sea of Queen-related cryptocurrencies.
Some of the NFTs that were up for auction on OpenSea were digital stamps with the Queen's profile, photos of the Queen, and pixelated art of the Queen with her eyes shining red.
In the meantime, more than 40 new cryptocurrency tokens with names like Queen Elizabeth Inu, Save the Queen, QueenDoge, London Bridge is Down, and RIP Queen Elizabeth were released on decentralized exchanges on the BNB Smart Chain and Ethereum.
Some might call it distasteful. Some people may be making money. Cointelegraph says that the Queen Elizabeth Inu token on BSC-based PancakeSwap had the biggest price increase in the last 24 hours, at 28,506%.
The Elizabeth token also went up, but not as quickly. It went up 8,442% and was traded $2.7 million worth of times in just under 12 hours.
Cointelegraph says that there is only about $17,000 and $204,000 worth of liquidity behind the Queen Elizabeth Inu and Elizabeth coins. This makes it seem like they might not have enough money or be part of a "pump and dump" scheme.
"Rest forever in Ethereum"
Within hours of the queen's death, the RIP Queen Elizabeth project went on sale on OpenSea with 520 NFTs, and the RIP The Queen Official project made 8,000 digital artworks, each with a different mouth, eyes, and background that were generated by an algorithm.
QueenE is one of the most well-known Queen Elizabeth NFT projects. It was started by Web3 builder Fabio Sevá and the alias mladen.eth at the beginning of July. It was made to send out NFT pieces of the Queen that were made by an algorithm for the rest of her life.
When it was announced that the queen had died, the project said that the 73rd QueenE NFT auction would be the last. They hinted at another "Gen2" collection in the future, but they didn't say anything else.
On the site of the NFT auction, the project's creators wrote a tribute to the queen, calling her "a strong woman who was given power and a position she never wanted but used with grace and fairness.
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" Exchange-rates.com says that the last QueenE Gen1 NFT sold for 2.730 ETH, which is about $4,623. This is the most anyone has paid for a piece in the collection.
But right after the last Gen1 auction ended and the creators of QueenE said they wouldn't add any more NFTs to the collection, they did so at 4:30 a.m. ET with an NFT of the queen as a pixelated skeleton. The price of the piece right now is 0.05 ETH.
