Uniswap founder Hayden Adams burned 99% of the HayCoin (HAY) supply on October 20, according to an announcement on X (formerly Twitter). Most of the tokens have been removed from circulation due to Adams' concerns about price speculation over the past few days.
Adams deployed the HAY token for testing five years ago, prior to the launch of the Uniswap decentralized protocol. He created a small test liquidity pool with a small fraction of the total supply and held over 99.9% of the HAY tokens in his wallet. Just a few weeks ago, the token was trading as a memecoin in the six-figure range:
"Over the years, some people have noticed it and bought it as a joke or for its novelty. I was very surprised to see people buying and selling significant amounts of dollars last week, treating it like a memecoin. Cryptocurrencies can be strange sometimes."
Five years ago, before the release of Uniswap v1, I implemented a token called HayCoin to use in testing. This was when gas was so cheap that the main network could be used as a test network. After the release of version 1, I created a small test liquidity pool with a small fraction of the total...
โ hayden.eth (@haydenzadams) October 20, 2023
According to Adam's post, around $650 billion worth of HAY tokens were burned. The Uniswap founder called the price speculation "dumb," noting that he doesn't want his profile photo to be associated with the token:
"Ultimately, I feel uncomfortable owning almost the entire supply (~99.99%) of a token that people are speculating and making memes about, so I decided to burn the entire amount in my ("valued") wallet. at an absurd ~650 billion dollars).
When a token is burned, it is permanently removed from circulation. But it also creates inflationary effects on its price since the number of units available decreases. At the time of writing, the HAY token is trading at $2,392,640, up more than 235% in the last 24 hours. according to CoinGecko.
Adam's move caught the attention of "Assuming a $0 cost basis, a provision of ~$650 billion results in ~$128 billion of long-term capital gains liabilities," one user wrote.
Others suggested that Adams could have sold the chips before burning them and donating the proceeds.
Magazine: Are DAOs overrated and unviable? Lessons from the front
Post navigation
