Uniswap founder burns 99% of $Hay supply, token price surges 300%, former employee accused of dumping tokens?

Uniswap founder Hayden Adams tweeted this morning that due to concerns about the concentration of nearly all of the HayCoin $HAY supply, he burned 99.99% of the test coin's supply that he launched five years ago, after which the token surged over 300%. Additionally, it appears that former employees are profiting significantly by selling the token.

The Origin of HayCoin

Hayden Adams revealed on Twitter that he deployed a test token called HayCoin on the Ethereum mainnet five years ago when Uniswap v1 had not yet been released, and Ethereum gas fees were very cheap at that time.

Five years ago, before the launch of Uniswap v1, I deployed a token called HayCoin to use for testing. This was back when gas was so cheap that mainnet could be used as as a testnet. After the launch of v1, I created a small test liquidity pool with a tiny fraction of the total…

— hayden.eth 🦄 (@haydenzadams) October 20, 2023

He mentioned that after the release of v1, he used a portion of the total supply of $HAY to create a small test liquidity pool, while the remaining $HAY was kept in his wallet. He even used $HAY to test the migration contract from Uniswap v1 to v2.

Adams: I Feel Unsettled by Owning Almost All Tokens in Supply

However, Adams noticed in recent years that some people had taken notice of the existence of $HAY and started buying it as a meme coin. Recently, there were even individuals spending a significant amount of funds trading $HAY.

In these few days, I felt unsettled by owning 99.99%, almost all of the token supply, as people were engaging in a large volume of speculative trading using the token. Therefore, I decided to burn all of my $HAY tokens from my wallet, 999,904 tokens, valued at over 650 billion USD at the time.

It is reported that he sent all of his $HAY tokens from his wallet to a burn address and indicated that he had not sold any since creating the token source.

HayCoin Token Surges Nearly 600%

Following the news of the sharp reduction in the token supply, the price of $HAY tokens surged by 580% within 3 hours, reaching a peak price of 4.19 million USD per $HAY token, and has now dropped to 2.53 million USD.

Over 54% of Liquidity Still Held in a Single Wallet

Furthermore, some users pointed out that there is still an unknown wallet holding around 51 $HAY tokens worth about 105 million USD, accounting for over 54% of the current circulating supply, questioning why Adams did not burn all the tokens.

However, some users believe that this might be an unmanaged, abandoned test-related wallet.

Former Employee Accused of Selling $HAY Tokens Opportunistically?

It is worth mentioning that DeFi researcher Defiyst discovered that someone seemed to be taking advantage of the situation.

The lesser known Uniswap Co-Founder (JChan) dumped his whole $HAY stack in 1 transaction for 92ETH, and it wicked to 0.

Given Hayden burnt the vast majority of the supply, JChan was the largest real holder. Funds sent to jchan.eth afterwards. pic.twitter.com/CZhcuMjdWr

— DeFiyst (@DeFiyst) October 20, 2023

Defiyst claimed that a former frontend developer of Uniswap, currently working at Kyokan named Jacky Chan, dumped all his $HAY tokens to the market within hours of the news release, allegedly being the largest holder of the token as the supply nearly reached zero at that time.

According to Etherscan data, he converted all his $HAY tokens to a total of 91.77 ETH and then sent the funds to jchan.eth.

However, there is currently no direct evidence to show whether the owner of the jchan.eth wallet is the same person as Jacky Chan, and it cannot be confirmed if there were any insider trading or market manipulation between jchan.eth and Adams.