

Many are minted in numbers rarely seen outside astronomy books - trillions, quadrillions - which dooms them to vanishingly tiny prices.įrom the outside, the hype coin party is a mystery. Few hype coins have any utility as currency. It’s hard to think of another financial craze in which so many people poured so much into entities with so little intrinsic value. To them, crypto is both a source of hope (in imminent riches) and fellowship (many coins have chats on Telegram, an encrypted messaging app, that can sound like faith-based support groups). Some are the same traders who have been leaping into stocks like GameStop and AMC Entertainment. The developers, on the other hand, can make tens of thousands of dollars, sometimes a lot more.ĭespite this track record, hype coins have become the investment of choice for millions of people, most of them men in their 30s, or younger, and convinced that the economy writ large is rigged against them. The vast majority of these tokens are worthless within a couple of weeks. Every day, dozens of them are created around the world by developers promising fortunes to would-be investors. Hype coins, as they’re known, sit squarely on the flashy, speculative end of the cryptocurrency business. Or space-bound and delicious, like AstroCake, which was described this way: “Created 5 minutes ago.


Or headed for outer space, like Pluto Coin. They have names that make them sound delicious, like Cookie Coin.
