The United Kingdom will soon introduce its own non-fungible token in effort to the lead the way in cryptocurrencies, CNBC reported.
Rishi Sunak, the UK's chancellor of the exchequer, has directed the Royal Mint to put out the NFT by the summer, his deputy John Glenn said at a conference in London on Monday.
Glenn added that the UK government planned to prioritise blockchain technology and even consider borrowing money and issuing debt using it, according to the Independent.
Non-fungible tokens refer to units of data stored on blockchain -- a digital ledger. NFTs can be used to represent items such as photos, videos, audio, and other types of digital files.
The tokens use a digital ledger to provide a public certificate of authenticity or proof of ownership, but does not restrict the sharing or copying of the underlying digital files or the re-creation of identical NFTs.
Glenn, who is the economic secretary to the UK's treasury, said that the NFT would be emblematic of the "forward-looking approach we are determined to take".
The hugely-popular NFTs are speculative purchases. Glenn said the UK will have in place multiple measures to regulate digital assets.
“We shouldn’t be thinking of regulation as a static, rigid thing,” he was quoted as saying by CNBC. “Instead, we should be thinking in terms of regulatory ‘code’ -- like computer code -- which we refine and rewrite when we need to.”
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