A relatively new crypto coin, omicron, which bears the same name as the new Covid-19 variant, has seen a massive spike recently, outperforming major cryptos bitcoin and ethereum.
The token OMIC surged over 900% since Saturday to reach an all-time high of $689. Its market cap has soared to over $400 million. The cryptocurrency was trading at $379.61 as of 08:40 GMT on Tuesday.
CoinDesk described the rise of the obscure token as an example of “peak irrationality,” since the cryptocurrency rallied owing to its name. The B.1.1.529 coronavirus strain (Omicron) was named after the 15th letter of the Greek alphabet by the World Health Organization on Friday. Experts say that OMIC is far from being a safe haven asset.
READ MORE: Omicron: What we know about the new Covid variant
The OMIC coin is built on ethereum scaling technology Arbitrum. The token was created as a fork of the OlympusDAO DeFi protocol. Each OMIC DeFi token is said to be backed by a basket of assets, “giving it an intrinsic value that it cannot fall below.”
The total supply of the crypto token is capped at 1 million, which means that the majority of its tokens are yet to be mined and traded.
For more stories on economy & finance visit RT's business section