- YFI has temporarily toppled Bitcoin to be the most expensive cryptocurrency
- The DeFi token topped out at $13,918 on Uniswap overnight
- No token has ever taken Bitcoin’s number one spot
YFI, the token belonging to DeFi project yearn.finance, has become the most expensive token in the cryptocurrency space after it overtook Bitcoin last night. The token, which only launched on Uniswap a month ago, has enjoyed an inexorable rise from $124 on its listing day to a sensational $13,918 overnight before dropping back to the $11,000s. This marks the first time that Bitcoin has ever been knocked off the top spot, although it still retains the honor of being the biggest coin by market cap, being over 600 times bigger than YFI in this respect.
YFI Achievement Down to Low Supply and Hype
The closest any coin has come recently to toppling Bitcoin was when Bitcoin Cash got to $4,200 in December 2017, but even then it was still magnitudes off the top spot. Its market cap at that point was $71.4 billion, so it is pretty incredible that YFI has managed to go one better and achieve top spot with a market cap of only $350 million.
YFI has been able to achieve this feat due to its low token supply. Just 30,000 tokens have been minted compared to Bitcoin’s 21 million, and riding on the DeFi hype, plus its early appreciation and relentless shilling on crypto Twitter, the coin has seen tremendous buy pressure and soared to 113x its original value, achieving in one month what it took Bitcoin 4 years and 8 months to achieve:
While many in the DeFi space have been pleased with the headline-grabbing price action, others were more focused on the fundamentals – or lack of them:
the intrinsic value of $YFI is $0. A Ponzi concealed in a magnificent looking box is still a Ponzi.
— ๑ Panda ๑ (@RamenofBinance) August 20, 2020
Performance Symptomatic of DeFi Craze
YFI’s achievement was only temporary however, with the coin rapidly losing more than $2,000 and falling back to number two after topping out, but the fact that it managed to achieve this in the first place shows just how much hype is around DeFi coins at the moment and the ludicrous gains that are being made on them by speculators.
