Uniswap founder Hayden Adams has burned $650 billion worth of HayCoin, an ERC-20 token he created five years ago, before the decentralized cryptocurrency exchange was launched. Only a tiny fraction of the tokens were ever released, as a liquidity pool for testing. In recent weeks the coin has been picked up by degen traders and has achieved meme-coin status, trading for millions of dollars.
Adams posted on social media platform, X, to explain the reasoning behind his decision.
“Over the years, a few people have noticed it and bought it as a joke/for the novelty of it. Was extremely surprised to see people buying and selling significant dollar amounts this past week, treating it like a memecoin. Crypto can be weird sometimes.”
Adams claimed that he was uncomfortable with owning around 99.99% of a token that had become a conduit for “silly” speculation, describing the $650 billion valuation of his holding as “absurd”. He went on to clarify that he wanted no further involvement with the token, and requested that his profile picture (PFP) should no longer be used as the logo of the now meme-coin.
Some commenters suggested that Adams could have sold the tokens and used the profits to benefit good causes, and even “ended world hunger”. Of course, with such an increase in the availability of tokens on the market, the price would have simply tanked, making the coin worthless once more.
However, the actual outcome of Adams’ mammoth burn is perhaps even less desirable. The removal of such a large proportion of tokens caused a massive spike in the price of HAY, which jumped nearly 500% in just three hours, from $650,000 to almost $4 million, according to CoinGecko.
Even more worrying, is that over 50% of the remaining token supply is held in a single wallet. It would appear that Adams’ holdings may not be the only things getting burned, as any large release of coins from this wallet would flood the market and virtually ensure the incineration of over 5,500 speculators.
Just last week Uniswap caused a stir among UNI token holders with the introduction of a new fee model. Just prior to that, the community was up in arms over a Uniswap ‘hook’ that enabled users to be checked for KYC (know your customer) before they are allowed to trade in certain pools.
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Uniswap ‘hooks’ are a new innovation for V4, allowing developers to insert or modify code without altering the main structure of the program. This will allow pools to implement features such as dynamic fees, on-chain limit orders, and now it seems, KYC.
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