How an unsuspecting crypto meme exploded in price beyond bitcoin
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Folks are making hay out of HayCoin, a cryptocurrency never intended to carry any value at all.
Why it matters: The price of the coin hit more than $4.2 million recently, making each worth more than a bitcoin.
Yes, but: That's only because the major HayCoin supply holder burned 99.99% of the coins on Saturday.
- Uniswap CEO Hayden Adams burned them, ironically, to separate himself from what he called the "silly" speculation that had arisen around the 0.01% of the coins that weren't collecting dust in his wallet.
Catch up fast: HayCoin was the inaugural coin of an earlier version of the decentralized protocol Uniswap. Adams in a social media post Saturday said he created a small liquidity pool for the coin around five years ago to conduct some testing.
- Over the years, he said, a few people bought it as a joke, or for the novelty of it.
- But over the past week, he said, he noticed people buying and selling "significant dollar amounts."
What he's saying: "Ultimately, I'm uncomfortable owning almost the entire supply (~99.99%) of a token that people are memeing and speculating on, so I decided to burn the full amount in my wallet ("valued" at an absurd ~$650b)," Adams said Saturday in the post.
Be smart: Coin prices are a function of supply and demand, and burning tokens effectively wipes them permanently from the market, thus boosting the price of the remaining tokens.
The latest: The total self-reported circulating supply of HayCoin is now 56, according to CoinMarketCap.
- It's still priced over $3.5 million, although trading is happening with fractional shares, at lower prices.
The bottom line: HayCoin is mainly just an idea. It's a token spun up by and then denounced by a crypto legend. In that way, it's the latest meme coin.
