The archive · Product Ideas · Product decision · 2021
Royal Canadian Legion's Immortal Poppy encodes 118,000 names into NFT poppies
For the Remembrance Poppy's 100th anniversary, the Legion minted 100 NFT poppies at .1111 ETH carrying all 118,000 fallen Canadian soldiers' names.
Royal Canadian Legion
What it had to solve
To mark the 100th anniversary of the Remembrance Poppy in Canada, the challenge was to honour all 118,000 Canadian soldiers who had fallen — and to keep supporting veterans and their families while doing it.
How it works
For the 100th anniversary of the Remembrance Poppy in Canada, Immortal Poppy set out to honour every one of the 118,000 Canadian soldiers who have fallen. The result was a memorial built for the blockchain rather than a cemetery wall.
All 118,000 names were encrypted on the blockchain in the form of 100 collectible NFT poppies, symbolically priced at .1111 ETH — a direct reference to 11 November, the date remembrance is marked. Owning one meant carrying the names of the fallen with it.
The design made the memorial live on after the launch: each sale and resale of an NFT benefited veterans and their families, so the collectible kept raising support every time it changed hands. D&AD later archived the project in its awards.
Why it lands
- Encoding every one of the 118,000 names, not a token few, made the scale of loss the actual content of the artwork.
- Pricing each poppy at .1111 ETH turned a purchase into a ritual with the remembrance date built into the price.
- Resale royalties meant the memorial kept funding veterans long after the original mint.
- A permanent blockchain record gave the names of the fallen a public, verifiable home.
What it did
A digital memorial whose price encoded Remembrance Day and whose resale mechanics kept funding veterans beyond the first mint; D&AD archived the work in its awards.
What you can take
Build the meaning into the product's constraints — the date as the price, the anniversary as the count, the fallen as the content — so the memorial keeps telling its story with every sale and resale.
Since then
D&AD lists Immortal Poppy in its awards archive; the project remains a documented example of a charity NFT whose resale mechanics — not just the first sale — were designed to keep supporting veterans and their families.
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