Titanic mass grave to be looted for NFT’s • The Register
Comment What does Titanic have in common with NFTs? Not much. One lives on in the collective psyche as a monument to hubris while the other refuses to just sink already.
Still, speaking of nothing but the smell of dirty blockchain-adjacent lucre, RMS Titanic Inc (RMST), which has been collecting artifacts related to the ship since the 1980s, has linked up with NFT flingers Artifact Labs and Venture Smart Financial Holdings to ” bringing the RMS Titanic and its physical artefacts into Web3.”
The ship sank in the icy Atlantic in 1912, killing more than 1,500 people on board.
Aiming to “place the legacy of the Titanic in the hands of the global public,” at least those foolish enough to dabble in NFTs, the name of the game is to preserve “assets from the ocean liner as immutable NFTs” and allow “including participation in the RMST, which has exclusive rights to recover items from the wreck site.”
According to the announcement, Venture Smart Financial Holdings, Hong Kong’s first accredited virtual asset manager, will “lead in structuring the tokenization of the intellectual property and also develop tokenized instruments for accredited investors, drawing on its expertise as a licensed virtual asset manager. This will enable matching capital raising for ongoing research, extraction, conservation, exhibition and licensing of RMST’s assets.”
Artifact Labs will then “immutably” preserve “5,500 recovered physical artifacts from the Titanic with its NFT standard for historical assets on the blockchain.” RMST controversially has exclusive rights to salvage the wreck, so fresh relics from future dives will be marked as “ARTIFACTS”.
Jessica Sanders, RMST president, said: “We remain dedicated to sharing the legacy of Titanic, her passengers and crew, with people around the world. As the salvage operator in possession of the Titanic wreck site, we are determined to ensure that the Ship’s artifacts are preserved in perpetuity and available to future generations. We believe that moving into the digital space allows us to reach a wider audience with quality programming that educates and inspires. We are pleased to have found the expertise and partners that help us to achieve these goals.”
While RMST takes pains to paint it in a sympathetic light, the actions of the company show that the world’s most famous shipwreck is just there to be milked – hence NFTs as another revenue stream.
Before the first salvage expedition set sail in 1987, survivor Eva Hart protested: “To take these things up from a mass grave at sea just to make a few thousand pounds shows a terrible callousness and greed.”
RMST emerged as the “savior in possession” after decades of wrangling over dead people’s belongings, although Judge Paul Niemeyer described “a free finder-keeper policy” as “a short step from active piracy and looting”.
Still, RMST got to keep and display some 5,500 looted items – which they did… at the Luxor Casino in Las Vegas of all places. The traveling exhibition has since been visited by millions in locations around the world.
It claimed being named as the owner of the collection, valued at more than $200 million, was needed to cover the cost of the dives. Meanwhile, shareholders had been pushing the company to chase more profits. As part of the court decision, RMST was not allowed to break up the assembly.
Thanks in part to the success of the Titanic attraction in Belfast, Northern Ireland, near where the ship was built, parent company Premier Exhibitions filed for bankruptcy in 2018, after which it immediately sought rights to sell the artifacts, including valuable jewelry, with a minimum bid set at $21.5 million to pay creditors.
A consortium of museums and heritage organizations came together to try to save the collection, but were unable to raise enough money. Instead, Premier was bailed out by three hedge funds for $19.5 million and the auction was cancelled.
In 2020, the RMST managed to overturn a UNESCO protection that forbade cutting into or detaching any part of the Titanic – ostensibly to restore the Marconi telegraph machine that made the ship’s last distress call.
However, this also means that more treasures will be made more accessible – therefore more “items” to be minted. And there is no guarantee that new finds will not be sold to the highest bidder.
RMST’s NFT venture is short on details. While the violin played as the Titanic sank sold at auction for $1.7 million in 2013, we can’t imagine a digital image of it, or even a 3D scan, fetching a fraction of the price. Unfortunately, due to the misplaced fervor surrounding the mass grave, Titanic fanatics may be persuaded to wade into the NFT world and give RMST the encouragement it clearly does not need to further dismantle the site.
Even though NFTs crashed in value last year due to turmoil in the broader cryptocurrency market, projects like this keep popping up, rugs keep getting pulled, and people keep losing money. Sadder still, while the Titanic was fatally singled out for being unsinkable, there are NFTs who refuse to go down the same path. ®
