A little-known crypto that goes by the name of Omicron (OMIC) has reached a new ATH today following the news of a new COVID-19 variant that bears the same name.
The OMIC token reached $689 just a couple of hours ago, during the early hours of the Asian trading session. This has added a further 200% gain for the token and an incredible 945% since Saturday when it had a price of $65.
The token has the same name as a new COVID-19 variant that was just discovered in South Africa a week ago, on November 23rd. It was named after the fifteenth letter of the Greek alphabet.
Mr. Whale, a famous crypto critic, has speculated that this huge increase serves as a sign that things are in a “giant bubble.”
Omicron represents a decentralized reserve currency protocol that is running on the Ethereum layer-2 network Arbitrum. The native token, OMIC, is backed by a couple of crypto assets, such as the USDC stablecoin.
The token can only be traded on SushiSwap for now. The exchange recorded $454,000 in volume for the OMIC/USDC pair across 24 hours. The project was created in early November as a fork of the OlympusDAO DeFi protocol, but the name similarity with the COVID-19 variant is a coincidence.
During the previous week, the stock market suffered following the news of a new COVID-19 variant. Things seem to be back on track now, as the crypto market is in the green again. The total market cap is now 5.6% over the previous 24 hours and sits at $2.71 trillion.