Uniswap creator Hayden Adams burned his token holdings over the weekend, effectively destroying 99.99% of the outstanding supply.
The first coins ever floated as an experiment by the creator of the decentralized exchange Uniswap are now trading at more than $3 million per token (yes, that’s not a typo), with a supply of just 4.4 tokens.
The original tokens were released by Uniswap creator Hayden Adams in 2019, back when the exchange was in its very initial stages. While first-ever coins to be seeded and traded on the platform were never intended to hold any value, and a large part of the supply was destroyed soon afterwards, a group of crypto traders stumbled upon some of the surviving tokens earlier in this month. They were able to acquire all 4.4 tokens available to the market – and called it HayCoin (HAY).
The rest of the undestroyed tokens were held in a wallet owned by Adams. The limited supply helped boost the price of the open-market coins to hundreds of thousands of dollars shortly after being traded, giving a market capitalization of under $10 million.
Adams, however, burned his stash on Saturday, effectively destroying 99.99% of the total supply. Burns are a way of permanently removing tokens from circulating supply by sending them to an address not controlled by anyone.
“Five years ago, before the launch of Uniswap v1, I deployed a token called HayCoin to use for testing,” he posted on X. “This was back when gas was so cheap that mainnet could be used as a testnet. After the launch of v1, I created a small test liquidity pool with a tiny fraction of the total supply and left the remainder in my wallet. I also used it to test the migration contract from Uniswap v1 to v2.”
“Over the years, a few people have noticed it and bought it as a joke/for the novelty of it. Ultimately, I’m uncomfortable owning almost the entire supply (~99.99%) of a token that people are memeing and speculating on,” he wrote.
Adam’s action means the 4.4 tokens are the only ones remaining of first Uniswap cons, which some crypto investors may attach a nostalgic value to, akin to a digital relic. Prices surged to as much as $4.4 million apiece Sunday, before settling above the $3 million mark on Monday.
Traders can purchase a fraction of these tokens, similar to any other cryptocurrency, but Adams remains generally unimpressed.
“To be extremely clear, I will have no future involvement, have burned all the HAY in my wallet, and think speculating on it is silly,” he wrote.