The Royal Mint has been given the task of creating an NFT to represent the “forward-looking approach” Her Majesty’s Treasury claims it will take towards cryptocurrencies and blockchains. John Glen, Economic Secretary to Treasury, announced the project in an speech. He said that more information about the mint’s location would be available .”

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While countries such as Ukraine have issued NFTS before ,, this announcement feels quite different. For one, it comes from the top levels of the British government. It is also expected to be done by the entity responsible for printing the country’s currency.

But that doesn’t mean the government will replace the pound in the UK with HerMajesty’sCoin any time soon. It’s easy to dismiss the announcement’s lack of details as a PR exercise. This is a way for the Treasury to show the UK that it is serious about making the country a hub of financial innovation and get “in the ground floor with crypto” (by, you might know, announcing an NFT more than a year after Taco Bell launched its own crypto token ).).

To be fair, it appears that the UK government takes crypto seriously. Glen announced that the treasury is asking a legal task force to consider the “legal status of decentralized autonomous organizations” (or DAOs). He also rounds up a lot of what the government is currently working on regarding crypto — the talk is 21 minutes long (though there’s a good amount of fluff), and you can watch it in full below.

Reuters does a good job of breaking down the major components, but as a TL;DR: the UK’s treasury is working on regulating some stablecoins (cryptocurrencies whose value is, in theory, largely tied to the price of fiat currencies), will be having a lot of meetings around crypto regulation and is still working on its “regulatory sandbox” to let crypto companies “test products and services in a controlled environment.”

As for the treasury’s crypto project, it’s hard to know what to expect. It’s unclear if it will be a collectible for crypto enthusiasts in the UK. Will it be just one NFT (the tweet suggests that there will be only one) kept in a hardware wallet at Buckingham Palace or Tower of London?

Honestly, that’s probably not the important part. NFTs may be buzzy, but crypto’s future will depend on how countries that have a large stake in global finance decide to regulate them.