Rishi Sunak’s NFT gimmick is a step too far

We had got used to the expensive trainers. The carefully curated hoodies were just about acceptable. The Twitter feed was starting to grate on people’s nerves, and so were the stage-managed photo ops, such as filling up a borrowed Kia Rio at Sainsbury’s right after cutting fuel duty, but they were part of the package. But the Chancellor Rishi Sunak may finally have come up with a gimmick too far with the launch of the Treasury’s very own digital token.

The Chancellor, between figuring out how to control inflation, pay for public services and reboot the economy found some time this week to launch the British government’s first NFT. For anyone who is not familiar with them, which admittedly is probably most people, Non-Fungible Tokens, to give them their full name, are unique digital assets, created to trade anything that can be collected.