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A Tiny Cryptocurrency Called Omicron Is Suddenly Rocketing—Even As The New Covid-19 Variant Tanks The Bitcoin Price And Crypto Markets.

This week, a new, fast-spreading Covid-19 variant dubbed as omicron has sent bitcoin, cryptocurrency, and traditional markets into meltdown,with investors being warned to "be on guard."

This week, the bitcoin price dropped more than 5% in a matter of hours, dropping from all-time highs of about $69,000 per bitcoin to 20% and plummeting bitcoin into a technical bear market that has destroyed billions of dollars from the total cryptocurrency market capitalization.

However, the price of one little cryptocurrency, which happens to be called omicron, has soared by about 500 percent in the days since the World Health Organization announced the new Covid-19 variant—reminding us of the recent surge and fall of a fraudulent Squid Game-inspired cryptocurrency.

Tiny cryptocurrencies frequently rise in value only to collapse a short time later in the frothy cryptocurrency market—which can mean even larger and more established coins regularly post abrupt, double-digit percentage gains and losses.

Last month, an unaffiliated crypto project inspired by the popular Squid Game TV show but unaffiliated with it or Netflix NFLX -0.4 percent saw its squid cryptocurrency rise thousands of percent before crashing back to nearly nothing.

This year, a slew of meme-based cryptocurrencies, lead by dogecoin and its main rival shiba inu, have soared up the cryptocurrency price charts, as traders bet hype helped on by the likes of Tesla billionaire Elon Musk will translate to longer-term value.

The price of omicron's omic coin has risen from roughly $50 to almost $400 in the previous few days, as measured by cryptocurrency price data tracker CoinGecko. Despite its rise, neither CoinGecko nor Crypto.com, a bitcoin and cryptocurrency exchange, have enough information on omicron to assign it a market capitalization.

Only the controversial decentralised exchange SushiSwap may trade Omicron, which is touted as "a decentralised treasury-backed money protocol" built on the ethereum scaling technology Arbitrum and released just weeks ago. Due to their decentralised nature, which means there is no central authority in charge, such exchanges are known to be frequently targeted by hacks, exploits, and so-called rug pulls, in which users' funds are stolen.

After the WHO named the new Covid-19 variant, the price of omicron skyrocketed, even as the price of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies fell sharply.

Meanwhile, despite the new Covid-19 variant sending the bitcoin price into meltdown this week, bitcoin and crypto market experts are generally positive.

In emailed comments, Martha Reyes, head of research at digital asset primary brokerage and exchange Bequant, stated, "The news of a new Covid variant coming out of South Africa contributed to a broad-based sell-off across asset classes." "If lockdowns occur, which is not our base case scenario, this will result in more helicopter money, which will assist digital assets in the end."

Some in the crypto industry, who are used to crypto values moving independently of equities and traditional assets, were shocked by the crypto sell-off this week, which saw the bitcoin price decrease in line with traditional markets.

In emailed comments, Tally Greenberg, head of business development at blockchain company Allnodes, stated, "The cryptocurrency market, for the most part, does not correlate with the regular markets."

"However, there come times when even cryptocurrency follows global events. The news of a new Covid-19 variant has shocked the world with yet another uncertainty about our global road to recovery, , causing a major drop in large and small cryptocurrencies, as well as stock and bond prices in all countries."