Omicron: a Covid virus and a DeFi token

We saw a strange case of ‘buy the news’ this weekend. As news bulletins pumped out warnings about a new variant of the Covid virus that has been name Omicron, in the Asian markets, buyers went on an Omicron token (OMIC) buying spree.

The price of the OMC token spiked by an eye-watering 900% over the weekend to hit an all-time high of $689 during the Monday morning Asian trading session. On Saturday it was trading at $65!

Who had heard of the Omicron token before this weekend? The project’s founders could not have known that WHO would name the virus variant first found in southern Africa after the fifteenth letter of the Greek alphabet.

Omicron is a decentralized reserve currency protocol that runs on the Ethereum layer two network Arbitrum. The bond-based yield farming project only began life in early November, so it has done exceptionally well, thanks perhaps to a twist of fate.

Several other crypto assets, including the USDC stablecoin and liquidity provider tokens, back the native OMIC token. It can only be traded on the SushiSwap decentralized exchange, which has seen $454,000 in volume for the OMIC/USDC pair over the past 24 hours.

Unfortunately, the news about the new Covid variant didn’t have a booster effect on the rest of the crypto market, nor the stock markets. The latter slumped as the news of the new COVID variant spread and Black Friday saw a massive sell-off that wiped out November gains for the S&P 500 Index and the Nasdaq Composite.

However, we start the week with the majority of digital assets back in the green, and the total market cap up by 5.6%, an upward movement that crypto owners can only hope sticks, at least until the end of the year.