Shortly after a long-term holder burned a sizable portion of the tokens, the price of the first-ever tokens floated on the decentralised exchange Uniswap surged to $5.5 million apiece on Thursday morning.
Data from DEXTools indicates that the circulating supply of HayCoin (HAY), which subsequently fell back to $3 million, is currently just 4.35 tokens, distributed among 5,800 holders. Their market capitalization is currently close to $14 million. There are no HAY tokens kept in any other wallets besides the ones that are in circulation.
In 2019, during the early stages of the exchange, Hayden Adams, the creator of Uniswap, released the original tokens. A group of cryptocurrency traders discovered some of the remaining tokens earlier this month, despite the fact that the tokens were never meant to have any value and that a sizable portion of the supply was destroyed shortly after. They named it HayCoin after they were able to obtain those that were on the market.
Adams’s burning of his holdings earlier this week caused the price to spike. A wallet containing 51 HAY from 2019 burned the tokens on Thursday morning by sending them to an address under no one’s control, which probably contributed to the price increase.
A devoted community has swiftly formed around HAY, with some even referring to the tokens as the “original meme coin” and treating them like digital artefacts.
Even in cases where there is no inherent value, being the first at something tends to attract value among cryptocurrency investors.
Three months after the 2015 release of Ethereum, a collection of digital land, Etheria, was relaunched in 2021 by a few developers. The collection, which is largely regarded as the first-ever NFTs, initially sold for less than $1 at launch but quickly shot to over $130,000 in ether apiece during the previous market boom, demonstrating the high demand that older iterations can enjoy among cryptocurrency investors.