New Delhi: Following the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) naming of the recent fast-spreading coronavirus variant as Omicron, the relatively obscure cryptocurrency bearing the same name has witnessed a surge to an all-time high on November 29.
Omicron’s OMIC token hit an All-Time High of $689 in the early hours of Monday as per the Asian trading session. The surge has added another 200% gains on the day for the token and a rise of 945% since November 27 when the token was trading at $65.
The new Covid-19 variant was discovered on November 23 in South Africa. The WHO named the fast-spreading B.1.1.529 strain after the fifteenth letter of the Greek alphabet.
Besides, crypto critic ‘Mr. Whale,’ taking to Twitter commented that the massive spike is the sign that shows that things are in the “giant bubble.”
A crypto token named after the new COVID-19 variant ‘Omicron’ is up over 650% within the 3 days, and is now worth over $400 million.
If this isn’t a sign we’re in a giant bubble, I don’t know what is. pic.twitter.com/7ESD1v9wgF
— Mr. Whale (@CryptoWhale) November 28, 2021
Omicron is a decentralised reserve currency that operates on the Ethereum layer two network Arbitrum. The native token OMIC is supported by several other crypto assets which include the USDC stablecoin and liquidity provider tokens.
Meanwhile, it can be traded on the decentralised platform called SushiSwap which has witnessed $454,000 in volume for the OMIC/USDC pair over the last day as per CoinGecko.
In the last week, the stock markets experienced a downfall as the new coronavirus variant and Black Friday saw a massive sell-off that swipe away the November gains for the S&P 500 Index and the Nasdaq Composite.
However, with this week starting the crypto markets are trading in the green after falling to their lowest level since mid-October on Saturday. According to CoinGecko, the total market capitalisation has increased by 5.6% over the last 24 hours and is currently priced at $2.71 trillion.
