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There’s never a dull day in the cryptocurrency market. From food-based meme coins that attract billions of locked value and generate extremely high yield, to a likely mistake that caused the price for a token to surge half a million percent in a few hours – there’s something for everyone.
Buying the Wrong UNI
UNI (the latest one) is the governance token of the largest decentralized exchange protocol and automated market maker, Uniswap.
As CryptoPotato reported yesterday, the token generated tremendous buzz in the industry, especially as everyone who used Uniswap before September 1st received 400 UNI tokens that currently trade at a price of $5 each.
This had a serious effect on Ethereum’s network as fees took for the sky, and miners generated as much as a million dollars in transaction fees in an hour.
But that’s not the most bizarre thing that happened. A token, carrying the same ticker as Uniswap’s token but called Unicorn Token, surged an amazing 500,000% before crashing back to the abyss it came out of.
Unicorn token’s price surged from approximately $0.001 to a whopping $5 in a matter of minutes and actually traded at this astonishing rate for a while before crashing back.
A Human Error?
A human error appears to be the most obvious and probable explanation of what happened. Confused investors might have rushed to the market in hopes to purchase Uniswap’s new UNI token, without paying much attention to details.
It’s also worth noting that the token was mostly traded on a relatively lesser-known cryptocurrency exchange and generated a 24-hour volume upwards of $46 million. To compare, the only other exchange that supports the token accounts for less than $5,000 of the 24-hour volume.
In any case, other tokens with the same ticker, such as Universe Token, have also seen a slight increase in their value, likely for the same reason.