The price of the mysterious digital token with around 1000 followers rose nearly ten times from Friday to Monday morning when it crossed $688 and tumbled down 75%, CoinGecko told Reuters. The WHO names Covid variants after Greek alphabets. So the new strain B.1.1.529 is named Omicron, the 15th letter of the Greek alphabet.
The Omicron token hit $689, a record high, over the Monday morning Asian trading session. The move had added an additional 200% gain on the day for the token. It also reached a 945% high since Saturday when it traded around $65. The token came earlier in November and probably rose with the spread of the freshly named covid strain. OMIC potentially outperformed the crypto giants, bitcoin, and ethereum over the weekend.
The token’s cap is 1,000,000, a majority of its tokens are yet to be mined and traded. It runs on the Ethereum layer-two network Arbitrum. Moreover, several crypto assets back the basic OMIC token, like the USD Coin stablecoin and tokens that provide liquidity.
According to CoinGecko, Omicron can be traded only on the SushiSwap decentralized exchange; it has seen $450,000 in volume for the OMIC/USDC pair over the last 24 hours. The token analytics website does not have any details on the supply of OMIC or market capitalization.
Crypto markets entered greenback again earlier in the week after dropping to their lowest since mid-October on Saturday. Total market capitalization is high 5.6% and is now at $2.71 trillion.
The Omicron token is described as ‘a decentralized treasury-backed currency protocol’ by its website. It traded at around $371 at 1435 GMT, worth around $65 Thursday.
The WHO named the new variant on Friday as many countries reported cases and called it ‘very high risk.’
Countries have started banning travel over fears of a global surge, and scientists are yet to understand its severity.
Bitcoin witnessed its worst day in two months, down 8% on Friday as investors moved towards safe havens like dollars from stocks and riskier assets. Since the drop, it has recovered nearly all of its losses, with global markets calming down on Monday.
It is yet to be known if the token is a part of a ‘rug pull’ scam like the Squid Game cryptocurrency scam. Inspired by Netflix’s ‘Squid Game,’ investors piled on to the new cryptocurrency and lost millions of dollars. Its value plunged to zero in just a few hours.
A ‘rug pull’ is where crypto developers vanish with investors’ funds and abandon the project. Talking of Squid crypto, it is speculated that the creators took the £2.4 million and vanished.
Crypto enthusiasts are now betting on new variants of the coronavirus to cash in on their popularity. Considering that, the next is Pi, and a cryptocurrency with that name already exists.