NFTs of Queen Elizabeth’s Art Flooded Into The OpenSea Market

[TL;DR]
🔹 In the wake of the demise of the British Monarch, Queen Elizabeth II, the largest NFT marketplace, OpenSea, has been flooded with multiple NFTs to commemorate her life and death.

🔹 Thousands of NFTs have gone live on OpenSea since the announcement on Thursday, counting the 8000 plus RIP The Queen official collection.

🔹 NFT trading volume is up 32% from its $8.44 million at the beginning of September and is currently at $12.3 million since then, while transaction volume hit 52.3k on the day of the announcement. In contrast, it was at 48.8k at the beginning of the month.

🔹 A DAO collection of QueenE has risen significantly in both sales volume and price, selling over ten pieces within 10 hours with a more than $1000 floor price after a 23-day lapse in sales.

🔹 NFTs are not the only ones having a field day out of this news, as meme coins celebrating the late monarch are also springing out of the woodwork and making waves.

🔹 It is unclear how long this surge would last, but available data shows that the trend is dipping once more.





Introduction

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On Thursday, the 8th of September 2022, the death of Queen Elizabeth the Second, queen of England, was made public. Interestingly, web3 seems to be one of the first sectors to benefit from the announcement as a major NFT marketplace; OpenSea experienced the influx of QueenE-inspired NFTs. As the royal family grieves, NFTs and NFT collections numbering in their thousands have flooded the OpenSea marketplace. According to Crypto Times, a single collection with the name “RIP The Queen Official” has listed more than 8,000 pictures of the queen as NFTs.

The QueenE DAO collection also released the final NFT in its 73-piece collection for auction. The piece, a portrait of the longest reigning monarch, is the last in a series of Ethereum NFT artworks celebrating Queen Elizabeth the second. The QueenE DAO collection’s Twitter page puts it succinctly, “Resting in Ethereum, Forever,” it says. Once this auction ends, collectors would have to buy on the secondary market or wait for the second-gen of NFTs, which is yet to be released.



NFT Sales Have Spiked Since The Announcement

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Since the announcement went live, QueenE-related digital assets have experienced a surge in price and trading volume. For example, the QueenE DAO collection sold 10 NFTs within 10 hours at a floor price above $1000 soon after the queen’s death. This was after a dry spell that lasted 23 days, where the last NDT sold before the queen’s death was not even up to $100. In fact, according to the Dappradar aggregator, NFT trading volume on OpenSea on the 8th of September climbed 32% from its previous $8.44 million recorded on the first of this month. Furthermore, The number of transactions between the 1st and 8th of September had increased by 3.5 thousand per Dappradar info.


Other Queen-Related Crypto Tokens Flood The Market To Take Advantage Of The Event

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NFTs are not the only class of digital assets exploiting the royal death announcement, as over 40 new coins have flooded the market in the wake of the news. These tokens are majorly meme tokens with queen-related names such as Queen, Queen Elizabeth Inu, RIP Queen Elizabeth, Queen Elizabeth Inu, QueenDOGE, etc. some of these tokens launched on Ethereum, while others debuted on Binance Smart Chain BSC.

So far, Elizabeth Token is the largest queen-inspired coin by trading volume, having a volume of almost $3 million within 12 hours. It spiked about 8500% to trade at $0.059931 but has liquidity of only $204,000, suggestive of a pump and dump scheme. The coin is not unlike a fellow queen-inspired token, Queen Elizabeth Inu, with its $17,000 liquidity backing.


Will This Queen-Inspired Crypto Surge Last?

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Like all hype-inspired market surges, it is unlikely that this NFT and crypto token surge will last. Dappradar data suggests that it will not last as the spike in both trading volume and transaction volume on OpenSea is proving short-lived. The trading volume has already dropped 35% from its Thursday high of $12.3 million, with transaction volume hitting 49.5 thousand from its previous 52.3 thousand.


To Wrap it All Up

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The death of Queen Elizabeth seems to have opened a window of opportunities for web3 initiatives. Although it is unclear how long that window will remain open. Degens are going all out to exploit it with their numerous Queen-inspired tokens and NFTs. As expected, Major NFT marketplace OpenSea is enjoying the ride as NFTs launch en masse, motivating more sales.



Author: M. Olatunji, Gate.io Researcher
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