In the days following the queen’s passing, more than 40 types of meme coins were minted, industry data and media reports show. These virtual forms of currency are often created by anonymous people with access to coin-creating websites — and an idea for a clever name. And they are notorious for wild swings in value.
That includes Queen Elizabeth Inu coin, which broadly honors her death and is built and available on various cryptocurrency platforms. The coin is currently priced around $.000003, after a nearly 30,000 percent surge and drop from where it started. There’s also Long Live the Queen, a coin that lost steam within hours of minting.
Experts said most of these coins are typically a joke or a scam rather than legitimate forms of payment — or even akin to gambling in the new decentralized world of the internet, known as web3.
“It’s no different from people selling T-shirts outside of Buckingham Palace,” David Hsiao, the chief executive of the crypto magazine Block Journal, said. “This is just the web3 version.”
By most accounts, meme coins came into existence around 2013,…
