What is the Omicron Cryptocurrency?

When the global markets fell on the back of Omicron’s rapid spread

So a Good Investment in crypto currency by the same name surged in value. The digital coin OMIC was unknown to the world before the WHO named the latest variant of the Covid-19 virus as ‘Omicron’. The digital token rose in value by almost 10 times within a week. However, its growth sprint wasn’t meant to last long as its value fell by 75%. 

So, what is the Omicron cryptocurrency and what does it stand for? This guide will provide you with some insights into this digital coin that has suddenly come into the limelight.

What is Omicron Coin?

Omicron is a decentralized reserve currency offered on the Arbitrum network. It was first listed in early November 2021. The listing was a fork of the Olympus decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) DeFi protocol. However, there is no information about its time of launching. 

Until now there has been an indication that Omicron has a higher degree of risk compared to other cryptocurrencies. Some of the key features of this crypto are as follows:

• An OMIC token has its value based on a series of assets within the OMIC treasury
• These assets include MIM and OMIC-MIM LP and assign a certain value to the OMIC token beyond which it cannot fall
• Using bonding and staking OMIC adds unique game-theoretic and economic dynamics to the market

Utility of OMC

The entity behind the Omicron token claims that its goal is to develop a policy-controlled currency system based on the Ethereum network. The way the OMIC token behaves in this network gets controlled at a high level. This system, in the long-term, is expected to find application as a global medium of exchange and unit-of-account currency. The short-term goal is to optimize this system for driving growth and generating returns.

OMIC Token’s Benefits for Investors

Omicron’s primary benefits are offered to investors in the form of its supply growth. It mines new tokens from the treasury and most of them are distributed to the investors. Investors can, thus, benefit from the auto-compounding balances. However, price exposure is also a key profit-making factor. 

Bonders can primarily benefit from consistency in OMIC’s price. Bonders can invest capital with the promise of getting a fixed return after a fixed period of time. The returns are then paid out in OMIC. So, the profit will be based on the token’s price at the time of the bond’s maturity. 

Impact of the Omicron Variant on OMIC

OMIC, the Omicron coin, was presumably launched at the beginning of November 2021, sometime before the first case of the Omicron variant of Covid-19 was detected in South Africa. However, it was the global announcement of the new variant of the virus that gave the digital token its destined hour of fame and week of the price surge.

‘Omicron’ refers to a letter from the Greek Alphabet. Before the World Health Organization’s announcement about the variant, OMIC was trading at around $65. Within three days, its price soared to an unprecedented $680, more than ten times.

It has since lost most of the value it gained. While the reason why the digital token gained so much value in just a few days can be explained, what cannot be explained is why the WHO named the virus variant so. It is worth noting that the WHO skipped two Greek alphabet letters Nu and XI in naming the variant that followed the Delta variant. 

According to the WHO, using the name ‘Nu’ for the variant could have created confusion, as the alphabet sounds similar to the English word, ‘new’. The letter XI was skipped to avoid associating any particular region with the virus.

Is Omicron a Worthwhile Crypto Asset?

Investors have been cautioned to ride on the Omicron crypto coin wave with care. During its surge, the digital token outperformed even Bitcoin and Ethereum in terms of growth. Since its rally and sudden fall, the coin has not seen any increase in its price recently. 

There is little information about this decentralized project. Similarly, any relevant data is hard to find. All these factors seem to point towards the same things – Omicron may not be a great investment option in the long term. However, its short-term prospects are worth exploring.