A newly-created cryptocurrency inspired by Will Smith slapping Chris Rock at the 94th Academy Awards has seen a massive surge over the last day.
What Happened: A token called Will Smith Inu WSI/USD began trading on decentralized exchange Uniswap UNI/USD shortly after the events at the Oscars unfolded.
lmao of course it’s up 10k%. Why wouldn’t it be? pic.twitter.com/lOuBPllCEc
— razor (@razoreth) March 28, 2022
Will Smith Inu $WSI / $WETH
Ethereum – UniswapPrice is up 266% in the last hour
Price: $0.000001191 – 24H Txns: 880 – 24H Volume: $770K – Liquidity: $250K#ethereum #uniswap #wsi #willsmithinu
— DEX Screener (@dexscreener) March 28, 2022
The Ethereum ETH/USD–based token amassed a trading volume of $3.65 million in the last day and has since lost most of its value. The token was still up 287% as of Tuesday morning.
As it is fairly simple to create a blockchain-based digital asset using the ERC-20 or BEP-20 token standard, meme-coin creators have often quickly capitalized on current trends to make quick profits.
In this case, the creator of the token reportedly made around 10 ETH or $33,000 while spending 4 ETH or $13,200 on creating the contract and supplying the initial liquidity.
Last year, a token inspired by Netflix Inc’s NFLX Squid Game saw a similar rise and fall in value. Despite being labeled an obvious scam, the token saw an 83,000% surge in price before crashing to zero.
Meme-coins Shiba Inu SHIB and Floki Inu FLOKI have also seen significant price rallies after Tesla Inc TSLA CEO Elon Musk tweeted about naming his dog “Floki.”