Warning: Be sure to do your own research before investing, as such unheard of coins involve high risk.
The announcement of the Omicron variant, a new “worrying coronavirus variant” that emerged earlier this week and started to spread, shook global markets on Thursday, with the cryptocurrency market taking a huge hit as a result. However, a low-capital token with the same name as the latest Covid variant has challenged the market amid the panic.
Omicron DAO with a local presence OMICjumped from $76 to an all-time high of $429.69 in the last 24 hours, registering a 464 percent rally as leading assets like BTC and ETH were bearish. At the time of writing, OMIC has lost a notable chunk of its gains and is trading at $331.
“OMIC is spreading fast! Make sure to wear a mask when trading on Arbitrum sushiswap.”
#omicron #OmicronVariant $OMIC is spreading fast! Be sure to wear a mask when trading on arbitrum sushiswap😷😷 contract address 0x86b3353387f560295a8fa7902679735e5f076bd5 (arbitrum only) pic.twitter.com/RCxZRtQiJ8
— TechnoArtoria (🦇,🔊) (@artoriamaster) November 28, 2021
Omicron DAO describes itself as a “decentralized currency protocol” built on top of Arbitrum, Ethereum’s most used Layer 2 solution today. Its native token, OMIC, went live on Arbitrum earlier this month. The crypto project does not mention the virus in its documentation, and the first Discord announcement was sent earlier this month, a few weeks before the final variant was named Omicron by the World Health Organization.
According to data from CoinGecko, the project has seen just over $360,300 in trading volume in the last 24 hours, with a total supply of just 2,430 coins. While the market value and circulating supply at current prices are unknown, the fully diluted valuation of the project is approximately $334 million. It’s such a small project that it doesn’t even have a ranking on the site yet, and the project has less than 1500 followers on Twitter and Discord.
The new Covid variant is thought to explain the sudden rise of OMIC. The variant was discovered in South Africa on Tuesday and was originally named B.1.1.529, but the World Health Organization shared an update on the variant in a blog post Friday, announcing it is an “alarming variant” and will be renamed Omicron.
This is not the first instance where the value of a crypto token has risen as a result of its name. In September, Floki Inu started to attract attention after Elon Musk shared a tweet stating that he bought a Shiba Inu dog and named it Floki, and experienced a parabolic rise with other dog tokens in October. Similarly, in a recent instance, a Canadian materials company called Meta saw its shares jump overnight after Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook would be rebranding as Meta.
Aside from the Omicron DAO, most of the crypto market was bearish over the weekend. Major assets such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, Polkadot, and Solana are all trading in the red today. Exceptions to the drop include The Sandbox and Decentraland, two Metaverse game projects that have outperformed the rest of the market since Facebook’s rebranding.
Disclaimer: What is written here is not investment advice. Cryptocurrency investments are high-risk investments. Every investment decision is under the individual’s own responsibility. Finally, Koinfinans and the author of this content cannot be held responsible for personal investment decisions.