The price of the Omicron (OMIC) token has risen more than 900% after the identification of a new strain of COVID-19. The World Health Organization (WHO) has named it omicron.
According to Twitter, Omicron was launched on November 2, before the events that led to the decline in Bitcoin and global markets last Friday.
$OMIC might be live on @Arbitrum now.
— Omicron DAO (Φ,Φ) (@OmicDAO) November 2, 2021
Probably nothing.
CoinMarketCap has been tracking its price since November 8, during which time its minimum value was $48.36. There are just over 800 participants in the project's chat on Discord, and the number of Twitter subscribers barely exceeds 900 people.
Rise in Omicron price a bubble?
On November 27, Omicron traded at levels around $65, and two days later the price reached an all-time high of $711.
The rise in the price of the coin did not go unnoticed by the media. According to a popular industry Twitter channel Mr. Whale, this growth is clear evidence of a bubble in the crypto market.
A crypto token named after the new COVID-19 variant ‘Omicron’ is up over 650% within the 3 days, and is now worth over $400 million.
— Mr. Whale (@CryptoWhale) November 28, 2021
If this isn’t a sign we’re in a giant bubble, I don’t know what is. pic.twitter.com/7ESD1v9wgF
“I bought OMIC for 9 ETH. I don’t think this is a good choice, but I want to try my luck with a meme token for money that will not affect my life,” writes one of the investors.
At the time of writing, the price of Omicron has corrected to $606. OMIC has an emission limit of 1 million tokens, however, the current circulating volume is unknown, as is the market capitalization. Despite the impressive growth, the volume of trades in the last 24 hours was $670,171.
The DeFi coin of the Omicron DAO project is issued on the Arbitrum One level 2 protocol. The DeFi protocol builds on Arbitrum technology used to scale the Ethereum network and allows users to engage in profitable farming. OMIC is backed by a basket of assets, including the USDC stablecoin, and traded on the SushiSwap decentralized exchange.
Although the developers could not have known about them in advance, the letters of the Greek alphabet are used to designate the strains of the coronavirus, so it was logical to assume that sooner or later the omicron would appear.
Coronavirus variant Omicron
Meanwhile, Omicron has been classed as a "variant of concern". Early evidence suggests it has a higher re-infection risk. However, the symptoms of the omicron variant have been described as “extremely mild” by the South African doctor who first raised the alarm over the new strain.
“It actually started with a male patient who’s around the age of 33 ... and he said to me that he’s just [been] extremely tired for the past few days and he’s got these body aches and pains with a bit of a headache,” she told the BBC.
The patient didn’t have a sore throat, she said, but more of a “scratchy throat” but no cough or loss of taste or smell — symptoms that have been associated with previous strains of the coronavirus.
After the heavily mutated variant was detected in South Africa, a swathe of countries have now temporarily banned travel from several southern African countries, a move slammed as a “knee-jerk, draconian” reaction by South Africa’s health minister on Friday.
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