CoronaCoin was a strange crypto phenomenon that was launched during the early days of the Corona virus pandemic.
Developed by a team that is still mostly unknown, and styling itself as "the world's first crypto backed by death." CoronaCoin basically allowed people to bet on the pandemic.
The total supply for the CoronaCoin was based on the world population, and tokens would be burnt once every 48 hours based on the number of those that have been infected or have died, according to the now taken down website.
So the value of the token would continue to rise the more people got infected and died from the virus.
"Some people speculate a large portion of the supply will be burned due to the spread of the virus, so they invest," said Sunny Kemp, one of the developers of the coin.
Kemp said the team was made up of seven developers, and he refused to name any of the other people involved.
Of course CoronaCoin wasn't accepted by the larger and more respectable cryto exchanges. The coin was listed on the Saturn Network, where at one point it made up almost 60% of its total volume!
Decrypt reported that the Saturn Network fell short of common standards, and recommended people to avoid the currency.
The people behind CoronaCoin argued that the currency wasn't any different than pandemic bonds issued by the WHO, and said that they would donate around 20% of the supply every month to the Red Cross.
Pandemic bonds are a way for governments to raise money to secure themselves against infectious diseases. They were first launched in 2017, but have been critized for providing very generous returns to investors. Investors would only lose money if certain conditions relating to a pandemic were met.
People online weren't happy about CoronaCoin to say the least. Many media outlets reported on it at the time, with users commenting "this is sociopathic" and and another saying it was "tasteless".
What exactly happened to the people behind CoronaCoin and their promises is a bit of a mystery. The project was very shortlived, it reached its all time high on 29-2-2020 at $0.03, long before the pandemic reached most major countries!
Surprisingly it is still listed on Coingecko and is now trading at $0.00000039. Their website has been taken down and it's unknown what happened to the currency itself, or how much profit has been made from it by the developers.
All it is now, is a very strange piece of crypto history.
I hope you enjoyed this article, thanks for reading!