Editor's Note: This article comes fromDC News（ID：shenliancaijing）, reprinted by Odaily with authorization.
Editor's Note: This article comes from
, reprinted by Odaily with authorization.As a pair of cotton (or polyester) socks, Unisocks may never have imagined that they would become so precious.From $12 when the Uniswap team released it in 2019 to the current highest price of $160,000, these socks have doubled 13,000 times.
Why does it look so ordinary, but it is so expensive, and it also leads to copycats and creative plagiarism?
Counterfeits, Pinduoduo and Justin Sun88.88 yuan! Unisocks/unicorn socks/blockchain/Uniswap/NFT!Hayden Adam, the founder of Uniswap and the "initiator" of Unisocks, if he knows how to use Chinese e-commerce, he will find that imitations of Unisocks have quietly appeared on Pinduoduo on the other side of the ocean.On 9.9, you can grab the iPhone and the socks in the next window for 5 yuan and 10 pairs of pinduoduo. This pair of white cotton socks with a price of 88.88 yuan is printed on a pink pattern. The product list is so out of place.However, although it is a counterfeit product, compared with the real product with a sky-high price of 120,000 US dollars, 88.88 yuan is almost equivalent to no money. Therefore, many people have placed orders in groups.In addition, what is interesting is that the day before, also in Pinduoduo, this pair of socks only cost 36 yuan.If the encounter between Bitcoin and Taobao is an ancient past that remains in memory, the current collision between Uniswap and Pinduoduo is somewhat confusing.The popularity of Unisocks not only gave birth to counterfeit products on Pinduoduo, but also made products that copied ideas appear.For example, SafuSocks, the socks on the Binance Smart Chain, or the imitation disk of Unisocks.Judging from the official introduction, except for the different design of the socks and the different chains on which the distribution is based, SafuSocks and Unisocks are no different.However, compared to the sky-high price of Unisocks, SafuSocks is much cheaper - currently only 5.44 BNB, about 1343 US dollars, 63 pairs have been sold.In addition, TronFi, the DeFi development team on Tron, also jointly launched JustinSocks (Sun Ge’s socks) with Justin Sun.Friends who participated in liquidity mining in the past year must be familiar with the name TronFi. After all, they have launched two phenomenal DeFi projects on Tron—Pearl.finance and SalmonSwap.It is understood that within one hour of the socks being released, the transaction volume exceeded 250,000 US dollars. Currently, the price of a pair of JustinSocks is 12186 TRX, about 633 US dollars, and 42 pairs have been sold.Perhaps in addition to the potential appreciation of hype, there are still many people who want to wear "Sun Ge" on their feet.
The birth of sky-high socksPerhaps seeing this, you are still confused: what is Unisocks?So let's take a look back at the birth history of this pair of $120,000 sky-high socks.In May 2019, the Uniswap team, which has not yet made a name for itself in the cryptocurrency field, launched Unisocks, a limited-edition, dynamically priced sock, at the Fluidity Summit in New York.These socks are anchored to the ERC-20 token SOCKS on Ethereum, which means that you can exchange 1 SOCKS for a pair of real socks. What's more, this pair of socks supports worldwide shipping.SOCKS conducts auctions in the form of bonding curves. Nowadays, bonding curve auctions are very common in the cryptocurrency field, but in 2019 before Uniswap became popular, bonding curve auctions were not so popular.The total amount of SOCKS is 500. At the beginning, a SOCKS token liquidity pool was established on Uniswap with 35 ETH as the matching ratio. The initial price of SOCKS was $12.In the design of the smart contract, when a user buys SOCKS, its price will increase, and the selling price will decrease. The price of SOCKS changes dynamically according to the relationship between supply and demand. Looks a bit like AMM? Yes, they are essentially the same.However, unlike AMM, users who purchase and hold SOCKS tokens can redeem (exchange) the SOCKS in their hands for physical socks. For every pair redeemed, one SOCKS token is burned.Although it is not stated on the Unisocks official website, according to users who have exchanged socks, they will also receive Unisocks NFT (ERC 721 tokens) when they get physical socks. However, Unisocks' NFT cannot be auctioned on Opensea at present, and the recent bidding record remains at around 3 ETH. However, in September last year, Hayden Adams tweeted that someone bought two of his Unisocks NFTs for 10 ETH.In October 2019, Uniswap announced the launch of the Unisocks redemption campaign. Users can exchange SOCKS for socks through the official website.So from here SOCKS enters the deflation phase.
The Unisocks official website shows that there are currently 185 SOCKS that have been exchanged for socks, and there are still 11 in the pool.In other words, 185 SOCKS have been destroyed, leaving only 315 SOCKS on the market.So, seeing this, you should know that the price of $120,000 actually belongs to SOCKS tokens.After all, it is difficult to trade and circulate after you exchange for socks. Would anyone be willing to buy a pair of second-hand socks?What can the exchanged socks do?Perhaps the best way to consume it is to put it on, take a picture and post it on social media, and then happily accept everyone's likes.On September 17, the price was $670. Two days later, on September 19, the price of the currency had soared to $7,800.If $7,800 is already beyond your imagination, since 2021, SOCKS at around $5,000 has started a hurricane mode, reaching its current all-time high price of $164,000 on March 4.
Magnification of UNI, microcosm of DeFiWhy SOCKS has such a high price?Someone once asked Hayden Adams on Twitter how to measure the value of physical socks. Hayden Adams responded: A pair of physical socks = international transportation cost + Unisocks NFT value + SOCKS speculative and meme value.If you look at it, the most important thing is the value of SOCKS, which is the so-called speculative and meme value.The meme value is somewhat metaphysical, so let’s take a look at the speculative value of SOCKS.If we compare the price curves of SOCKS and UNI, we can find that there is a strong positive correlation between the two.The rapid rise on September 17 mentioned above happened to be the day when Uniswap issued coins.On February 16 of this year, when Uniswap announced that it had become the first DEX with a transaction volume of more than US$100 billion, SOCKS also rose from around US$60,000 on that day to around US$92,000, the highest price in February.It can be said that the rise of SOCKS is linked to the development of UNI or Uniswap. SOCKS is the magnification of the explosion of UNI, and at the same time it is the epitome of the DeFi boom.Of course, pushing SOCKS up, especially in the recent record high, is more important to the hype enthusiasm of the players.
Before answering this question, you can try to answer the following questions:Why the Twitter CEO’s tweet NFT will be scrambled; why a pixel avatar can sell for more than 100,000 US dollars; why the NBA card can sell a transaction volume of 4.9 million US dollars; why Beeple’s NFT artwork has a high auction price at Christie’s $4.25 million?
Crypto Collectibles Sales RankingAll in all, from the popular DeFi field to the explosive NFT field, these popular hype targets are more or less related to the following three points:1. Well-known IP and celebrities; 2. Memes and communities; 3. Gameplay and modes.The Twitter CEO’s tweet NFT and NBA Top Shot were noticed and out of the circle because of celebrities/famous IP; The combination of NFT and DeFi mining adds new gameplay.Of course, there is the most important point - scarcity.From the traditional world to the encrypted world, from Bitcoin to DeFi currency to NFT, scarcity is a constant hype theme.The total limit of 21 million bitcoins, the hard cap of 500 SOCKS, the unique characteristics of NFT, plus the flood and inflation, gameplay and mechanism, art and creation, greed and FOMO, all these constitute the core of the cryptocurrency world hype wave.
