Uniswap Founder Burns $650B HayCoin
Uniswap founder Hayden Adams burned 99% of HayCoin (HAY) supply on October 20, according to X (formerly Twitter) announcement. Adams said most of the tokens were removed from circulation due to the price speculation of the previous days.
Adams deployed the HAY token for testing five years ago before launching the decentralized protocol Uniswap. He created a small test liquidity pool with a small fraction of the total supply and kept more than 99.9% of HAY tokens in wallets. A few weeks ago, the token was trading in the six-figure range as memecoin.
“A few people have noticed it over the years and bought it as a joke / for the novelty of it. Surprised to see people treat it as a memecoin when buying and selling large amounts of dollars this week. Crypto can be weird. Sometimes.”
Five years ago, before the launch of Uniswap v1, I deployed a token called HayCoin for testing. This was back when gas was so cheap that the mainnet could be used as a testnet. After v1 launched, I created a small test pool with a small fraction of the total…
— hayden.eth (@haydenzadams) October 20, 2023
According to Adam Post, about $650 billion worth of HAY tokens have been burned. Uniswap's founder has called the price speculation “stupid”, saying he doesn't want his profile picture attached to the token.
“Finally, I didn't feel comfortable with having the entire supply (~99.99%) of what people were thinking and speculating about, so I decided to burn the entire amount in my wallet (worth a ridiculous ~$650b) .”
When a token is burned, it is permanently removed from circulation. But it reduces the amount of units available and creates an inflationary effect on their prices. According to CoinGecko, at the time of writing, the HAY token has traded at $2,392,640, up more than 235% in the last 24 hours.
Adam's move has raised a few eyebrows on X. In addition to the impact on HAY's price, users have pointed out that token burning could be considered a taxable event. “If we assume a $0 cost basis, spending ~$650 billion would result in a long-term capital gains liability of ~$128 billion,” one user wrote.
Others suggested that Adams could have sold the tokens before burning them and donated the proceeds.
Magazine: Are DAOs Overhyped and Dysfunctional? Lessons from the front lines
