Ethereum whale's uniswap token briefly hit $100K — but there’s a catch
On Aug. 25, the creator of the well-known Uniswap tokens Antiample (XAMP) and Tokens of Babel (TOB) launched Boa. The Ether whale’s projects have seen growing interest within the niche Uniswap market.
A common theme among the projects of the pseudonymous developer Bill Drummond is unique supply systems. Through unorthodox mechanisms, like rebasing, the supply of XAMP and TOB decreases through coin burns over time.
TOB, as an example, is a token that uses rebases to decrease its supply but ensures the holder has a certain percentage of the total supply. Bill explains:
“Rebases of TOB affect the number of tokens in your wallet, but not your overall share in the total supply. If you own 0.5% of the total supply, you will always own 0.5% of the total supply, regardless of the number of tokens in your wallet.”
Why did Boa briefly hit $100,000?
Similar to Bill’s other projects, Boa also has a special supply system that makes it a deflationary token. Atop the coin burns, Boa also applies a 1% tax on sellers, not buyers, which disincentivizes sellers.
On paper, Boa hit $100,000, but its circulating supply was below 50, and the supply goes down even further as time passes.
Hence, even at a price point of $100,000, the actual market cap of the token would remain below $5 million. Currently, according to Uniswap, the price of Boa is trading just below $51,000. That places the market capitalization of the token at around $2.5 million.
The price of Boa hits $100,000 on Uniswap. Source: Uniswap.info
The developer said he took inspiration from yearn.finance’s YFI, which recently achieved a peak of $16,668 due to its small supply of 50,000. The developer said:
“People love YFI because it's so expensive. Number go up. Well, with Boa, there are only 50 tokens in circulation. Fifty. And with an incentive to burn, there will be even less and less to go around.”
Bill’s projects and unique tokens are more considered as experiments with specialized supply systems. The cryptocurrency market has seen crypto assets with a fixed supply or an inflationary supply, but none with a continuously decreasing supply with special conditions.
For instance, the developer said Boa was made after the team unexpectedly found some issues with XAMP and TOB. Bill said sellers were attempting to take advantage of the supply conditions. The developer explained:
“We studied how Antiample and Tokens of Babel were being traded in the community. There seemed to be activity centering around achieving or not achieving burns. This caused one side of traders to 'push' for a burn while the other side took advantage of this push and bought or sold against them. This created a conflict that was not expected.”
Are these experimental tokens a good thing?
Depending on how users perceive the emergence of specialized tokens, whether these Uniswap tokens benefit the cryptocurrency market over the long-term is debatable.
On the one hand, it allows a relative niche market and community to experiment with cryptocurrencies that operate based on conditional supply systems. But given their small market caps, experimental supply schemes and code, investing in such bleeding-edge digital tokens certainly carries major risks.