The Uniswap founder has destroyed his own meme coin, but the "HayCoin Carnival" is still ongoing
For meme coins, having the founder of Uniswap as your "developer" is a big deal.Author: Kaori, BlockBeats
On October 21, Uniswap founder Hayden Adams posted on social media that he had burned approximately 99.99% of the supply of HayCoin. Hayden wrote in the tweet, "I feel uncomfortable holding almost the entire supply (about 99.99%) of a token, especially when people treat it as a joke and a speculative object."
Hayden stated that he was "very surprised" to see people trading HayCoin for large amounts of dollars last week and treating it as a meme coin, adding, "Sometimes cryptocurrency is indeed very strange."
Before the launch of Uniswap v1, Hayden had deployed a token called HayCoin for testing. At that time, gas fees were very cheap, and the mainnet could be used as a testnet. After v1 was launched, Hayden created a small test liquidity pool that accounted for only a small portion of the total supply (0.01%) and kept the rest in his personal wallet. Hayden also used HayCoin to test the migration contract from Uniswap v1 to v2.
According to the anonymous account (@HayCoinERC) that made the first trade of HayCoin, on October 12, the account posted its first message stating, "Search Uniswap v1 trades to find the first token. I was surprised to find it was deployed by the Uniswap developer himself with a $50 V1 LP. (So) I bought all the V1 LP and paired the token with v3."
In the following days, according to DEXtools data, HayCoin gained some liquidity in the first few days of trading, but the hype gradually declined. Until October 21, after Hayden Adams declared the token burn on social media, HayCoin reached a maximum increase of 538%, with the price once exceeding $4 million each ($4.17 million). According to CoinGecko data, the highest price of HayCoin was $4,532,822, and currently, HAY has fallen back to $3 million.
It is worth mentioning that Hayden Adams's HayCoin token burn is the highest recorded dollar value burn on-chain.
The Rise of the "Degen Darling"
Returning to Hayden's statement, "Sometimes cryptocurrency is indeed very strange." Some "coincidences" support this view. October 21 is the birthday of Uniswap founder Hayden Adams, and November 2 is the 5th anniversary of Uniswap.
At this clever timing, the community seemingly staged a HAY celebration, with some members even creating visuals to illustrate the timeline of HayCoin's rise to fame.
For meme coins, having the founder of Uniswap as your "developer" is a big deal.
For the Degens in the meme coin space, finding a project like HAY that is historic and original is a refreshing and unique narrative after months of repetitive and boring content. Degen culture is based on such metas, "strange and quirky."
Since Uniswap's launch in 2018 until 2020, HAY was used for testing. Someone once asked Hayden in the comments what his favorite token on Uniswap was, and he replied HayCoin. This kept fueling the hype around HayCoin.
In Hayden's token burn statement on October 21, he mentioned, "I prefer a new logo that is not my profile picture—ultimately, if my photo is used in this way, I might consider requesting its removal." The community-created HayCoin official website subsequently changed the token logo featuring Hayden's portrait to the uppercase letters HAY.
Many accidental holders of HAY also reflected a side of Degen culture during this celebration.
wijuwiju.eth (@wijuwiju0x) purchased 1 HAY token for 0.011 e in 2022, and when he woke up on October 12, the price was 28 e, making him a whale of HAY. He then added 3 e to the liquidity pool to stabilize future prices.
Another notable HAY whale is John Palmer, a product manager at PartyDAO. John likely purchased 8.919 HAY tokens on June 16, 2022, while testing the V3 liquidity pool during their funding program work.
The community knew John Palmer's wallet was active and reached out to him through his Twitter. John then joined the HayCoin Telegram community and collaborated with the community to burn 6 tokens (worth about $7.23 million) before sending some tokens to LP and locking 1.5 HAY tokens.
Of course, John also made a small profit; among all HAY whales, he earned the second-highest profit by selling 127 e (about $200,000) at intervals.
The appearance of Ash (@ashleighschap), Chief Strategy Officer of RiscZero, brought the Degen celebration to another peak.
Ash's long-dormant wallet sold 16 e HAY, and during a Space, she recounted the history of HAY, stating that she held HayCoin because she was an early builder of Uniswap. However, most people were interested in how she would handle her HAY holdings.
The community suggested she burn all HAY tokens to stop circulation. Ash contacted John Palmer, stating that they both agreed in principle to burn most of their tokens. However, some expressed a desire for them to become community builders of HayCoin, establishing a fund to bring HAY into a larger world.
Continuous Doubts, Unstoppable Degens
With popularity comes controversy.
During the time HayCoin rose to fame, perhaps the most controversial yet also the most profitable was former Uniswap employee Jacky Chan. DeFi researcher Defiyst claimed that Jacky Chan, a former front-end developer at Uniswap, dumped all his HAY on the market within hours of the token burn news, reportedly because the supply was nearly zero, making him the largest holder of the token at that time. On-chain data shows that he exchanged all his $HAY for a total of 91.77 ETH, which he then sent to jchan.eth.
However, there is currently no direct evidence showing that the owner of the jchan.eth wallet is the same person as Jacky Chan, nor can it be determined whether there was insider information or market manipulation between jchan.eth and Hayden.
In addition, there is still an unknown wallet holding about 51 HAY tokens, accounting for over 54% of the current circulating supply, raising questions about why Hayden did not burn all the tokens, though this could also be an abandoned test wallet.
Returning to Hayden Adams's token burn of HAY, this move raised some doubts in the community. Aside from its impact on HAY's price, users pointed out that the token burn could be seen as a taxable event. "Assuming a cost basis of $0, a disposal of about $650 billion would result in approximately $128 billion in long-term capital gains liability." Some even suggested that Adams could have sold the tokens before burning them and donated the profits.
But these voices could not change the fact that HAY has become the hottest token in the meme coin space today, the celebration continues, and Degen culture once again refreshes the market amid its bleakness.
