Uniswap founder Hayden Adams has burned 99% of the HayCoin (HAY) token supply on October 20, as announced on X (formerly Twitter). Most of the tokens were removed from circulation due to Adams’ concerns about price speculation in the days leading up to the burn.
Adams deployed the HAY token as an experiment five years ago before launching the decentralized Uniswap protocol. He created a small test liquidity pool with a tiny portion of the total supply and held over 99.9% of the HAY tokens in his wallet. Just a few weeks ago, the token was trading like a memecoin in the six-figure range.
In his post, Adams stated that approximately $650 billion worth of HAY tokens have been burned. The Uniswap founder called the price speculation activity “ridiculous” and noted that he didn’t want his profile associated with the token:
“In the end, I wasn’t comfortable owning virtually the entire supply (~99.99%) of a token that people were speculating on, so I decided to burn the entire amount in my wallet (valued at a ridiculous ~$650 billion).”
When a token is burned, it is permanently removed from circulation. However, it also creates an inflationary effect on the token’s price because it reduces the available unit count. At the time of writing, the HAY token was trading at $2,392,640, up over 235% in the past 24 hours, according to CoinGecko.
Adams’ move raised eyebrows. Besides impacting the HAY price, users pointed out that burning the token could be considered a taxable event. One user wrote, “Assuming the base cost is $0, processing ~$650 billion would generate long-term capital gains of ~$128 billion.”
Others speculated that Adams may have sold some tokens before burning them and donated the profits.