According to an announcement on X (formerly Twitter), Uniswap founder Hayden Adams destroyed 99% of the HayCoin (HAY) supply on October 20. Most of the tokens have been withdrawn from circulation due to Adams’ concerns about price speculation in the previous days.
Five years ago, Adams deployed the HAY token for testing before the decentralized protocol Uniswap was launched. He created a small test liquidity pool that represents only a small portion of the total supply and keeps over 99.9% of HAY tokens in his wallet. Just a few weeks ago, the coin was trading like a meme coin in the six-figure range:
“Over the years, some people have noticed it and treated it as a joke/purchased it because of its novelty. I was very surprised to see people buying and selling large amounts of USD over the past week considering it a meme coin. Cryptocurrency It can be weird sometimes.”
Five years ago, before Uniswap v1 was launched, I deployed a token called HayCoin for testing. Natural gas was very cheap at the time and the mainnet could be used as a testnet. After v1 was launched, I created a small test liquidity pool that was only a small portion of the total…
— hayden.eth (@haydenzadams) October 20, 2023
According to Adam’s post, approximately $650 billion worth of HAY tokens were burned. Uniswap’s founder called price speculation “stupid” and noted that he did not want his profile picture associated with the token:
“Ultimately, I felt uncomfortable with having almost the entire supply (~99.99%) of a coin that people were mocking and speculating on, so I decided to burn the entire amount in my wallet (the “value” was ~$650b).”
When a coin is burned, it is permanently removed from circulation. But it also has an inflationary effect on prices because it reduces the number of units available. As of this writing, the HAY token is trading at $2,392,640, up more than 235% in the past 24 hours, according to Go to CoinGecko.
Adam’s actions attracted some attention from X. In addition to the impact on HAY’s price, users noted that token destruction could be considered a taxable event. “Assuming a cost basis of $0, approximately $650 billion in disposals would result in approximately $128 billion in long-term capital gains liabilities,” one user wrote.
Others suggested that Adams could sell the tokens and donate the profits before burning them.
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