In a highly negative scenario, a cryptocurrency called Omicron was able to gain almost 150%, and the only plausible explanation for this is the fact that this crypto is named after the new Covid variant.
The Omicron variant
The dangerous new variant of Covid 19, discovered in South Africa, has caused the financial markets, including the cryptocurrency market, to collapse. Since the news of this new mutation of the virus, called Omicron, came out, Bitcoin has lost almost 20% of its value.
The rally of the Omicron crypto
https://twitter.com/artoriamaster/status/1464960429051031553?s=20
Over the past seven days, this tiny and obscure cryptocurrency has jumped from $60 up to $450, only to fall back to around $250, with a current gain of over 130%.
OMIC’s gain since its low on November 19, with the price dropping to around $48, has risen as much as 735%.
Omicron DAO describes itself as a “decentralized currency protocol” based on Arbitrum, Ethereum’s most widely used Layer 2 solution today. According to CoinGecko’s data, the project has registered a trading volume of just over $414,000 in the last 24 hours and the total supply is only 2,430 coins. its capitalization and circulating supply are both unknown.
Some speak of this project as a meme, similar to the project linked to the Netflix TV series, Squid Game.
The coin would actually have been launched before news of the new variant came out. Others compare it to the case of the Floki coin, which made headlines after a tweet by Elon Musk, who referred to Floki, which is the name of his puppy dog, a Shiba.
Floki has arrived pic.twitter.com/2MiUKb91FT
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 12, 2021
The memecoin market
The particular case of this digital currency, which is soaring due to causes that do not depend on its design, but are determined by the mere fact that it bears the name of a Covid variant, is linked to the trend of so-called meme coins.
These are projects linked to a joke or a bet, which owe their success mainly to the correlation between their name (and symbol) and memes that have gone viral on the net.
The forefather of all meme coins was Dogecoin, a project born as a joke imitating Bitcoin, which remained in the shadows until it attracted the attention of the charismatic Tesla owner Elon Musk, whose tweets brought the cryptocurrency into the top ten for market capitalization.
Then it was the turn of Shiba Inu, which was created with the precise aim of countering its more famous ancestor. A few days ago, Shiba Inu achieved its goal, surpassing for a while the capitalization of Dogecoin.
In the wake of the two queens, dozens of meme coins have been created, probably including many scams, such as the now-famous meme coin created following the worldwide success of the Korean Netflix TV series Squid Game.
Who knows whether Omicron’s great success might not trigger a race to chase down the next Covid variant to be “tokenized”.
