Author: Kaori, BlockBeats
On October 21, Uniswap founder Hayden Adams posted on social media that he had destroyed approximately 99.99% of the supply of HayCoin. "Not comfortable with owning almost the entire supply (~99.99%) of a coin, especially when people treat it as a joke and an object of speculation," Hayden wrote in a tweet.
Hayden said he was "very surprised to see people buying and selling HayCoin for large amounts of U.S. dollars last week and treating it as a meme currency. Cryptocurrencies can be really weird sometimes."
Before the launch of Uniswap v1, Hayden deployed a token called HayCoin for testing. Gas was very cheap at that time, and the mainnet could be used as a testnet. After the launch of v1, Hayden created a small test liquidity pool with only a small portion of the total supply (0.01%) and kept the rest in his personal wallet. Hayden also used HayCoin to test the migration contract from Uniswap v1 to v2.
According to the account information of the anonymous person (@HayCoinERC) who first traded HayCoin, the account posted its first post on October 12, saying “Search Uniswap v 1 transaction to find the first token. I was surprised to find that it was developed by Uniswap The author himself deployed it with $50 of V1 LP. [So] I bought all the V1 LP and then paired the tokens with v3.”
In the following days, according to DEXtools data, HayCoin gained a certain amount of liquidity in the first few days of opening for trading, but its popularity gradually declined until October 21, after Hayden Adams announced the destruction of tokens and published relevant remarks on social media. , HayCoin's maximum increase reached 538%, and the price once exceeded US$4 million (US$4.17 million). According to CoinGecko data, the highest price of HayCoin was US$4,532,822. Currently, HAY has fallen back to US$3 million.
It is worth mentioning that Hayden Adams’ HayCoin token burn was the highest dollar value burn recorded on the chain.
The carnival and popular history of "Degen's new favorite"
Going back to Hayden’s words, “Cryptocurrencies are really weird sometimes.” Some "coincidences" support this view. October 21st is the birthday of Uniswap founder Hayden Adams, and November 2nd is Uniswap’s 5th anniversary.
At this ingenious time point, the community seemed to have staged a HAY carnival. Some people in the community even made pictures to visually show the timeline of HayCoin's popularity.
For meme coins, having the founder of Uniswap as your "developer" is a big deal.
For Degens in the meme coin space, finding a project as historic and original as HAY is a novel and unique narrative after months of repeating boring content. Degen culture is based on such metas, "weird and weird".
Uniswap has been using HAY for testing since its launch in 2018 until 2020. Someone once asked Hayden in the comment area what his favorite token on Uniswap is, and he answered HayCoin. This allows those who hype HayCoin to continue to add fuel to the carnival.
“I would prefer a new logo that is not my profile picture — ultimately, if my photo is used in this way, I may consider requesting an image license,” Hayden said in the October 21 token burn announcement. Frame." The official website of HayCoin created by the community subsequently changed the token logo with Hayden's portrait into the capital letters of HAY.
The behavior of many people who unintentionally hold HAY in this carnival also reflects the Degen culture.
wijuwiju.eth (@wijuwiju0x) bought 1 HAY token in 2022 at a price of 0.011e and woke up on October 12th at a price of 28e, making him a HAY whale. He then added 3e to the liquidity pool to stabilize future prices.
Another HAY whale worth keeping an eye on is John Palmer, Product Manager at PartyDAO. John purchased 8.919 HAY tokens on June 16, 2022, possibly while testing the V3 liquidity pool while working on their funding program.
The community knew that John Palmer's wallet was active and contacted him via his Twitter. John then joined HayCoin's Telegram community and worked with the community to burn 6 tokens (worth approximately $7.23 million), then sent some tokens to LP and locked 1.5 HAY tokens.
Of course, John also made a small profit, and among all HAY whales, he made the second highest profit by selling 127e (approximately $200,000) at intervals.
The appearance of RiscZero Chief Strategy Officer Ash (@ashleighschap) brought this Degen carnival to another climax.
The long-dormant wallet held by Ash sold 16e HAY, and told the history of HAY in a Space, saying that he held HayCoin because he was an early builder of Uniswap. But most people are interested in what she will do with the HAY she has.
The community suggested that she burn all HAY tokens to cease circulation, and Ash contacted John Palmer saying that they had all agreed in principle to destroy most of the tokens they owned. But some people expressed the hope that they can become community builders of HayCoin, establish funds, and bring HAY into the larger world.
Questions keep coming, Degen keeps coming
Controversy naturally arises when there is heat.
During the period when HayCoin became popular, perhaps the person who was most controversial but also benefited the most was former Uniswap employee Jacky Chan. DeFi researcher Defiyst claimed that Jacky Chan, the front-end developer of Uniswap, dumped all his HAY on the market within a few hours after the news of the token destruction. It is said that because the supply was almost zero, Jacky Chan was the representative of the token at the time. The largest holder of the currency. On-chain data shows that he converted all $HAY in his wallet into a total of 91.77 ETH, and then sent the funds to jchan.eth.
However, there is currently no direct evidence that the owner of the jchan.eth wallet and Jacky Chan are the same person, and it is still unclear whether there is inside information and market manipulation between jchan.eth and Hayden.
In addition, there is still an unknown wallet holding about 51 HAY tokens, accounting for more than 54% of the current circulation. Questioning why Hayden did not destroy all tokens, but this may also be an abandoned test wallet.
Returning to the matter of Hayden Adams destroying HAY tokens, this move caused some doubts in the community. In addition to the impact on HAY price, users noted that token burning may be considered a taxable matter. “Assuming a cost basis of $0, a disposal of approximately $650 billion would result in a long-term capital gains liability of approximately $128 billion.” Others suggested that Adams could have sold the tokens before burning them and donated the profits.
But none of these voices can change that HAY has become the most popular in the meme currency field today. The carnival continues, and Degen culture is once again refreshing despite the bleak market.
