The “BITCOIN” cryptocurrency has skyrocketed by over 300% in value over the past week – gains the world’s largest cryptocurrency could only hope to gain through a massive influx of investor capital.

That said, a closer look shows that’s not exactly what happened.

• “BITCOIN” is actually the ticker symbol for a relatively new meme token, called HarryPotterObamaSonic10Inu (ERC-20).
• Data from CoinMarketCap shows that the token is suddenly generating over $14 million in daily volume, mostly on UniswapV2 on Ethereum.

• “HarryPotterObamaSonic10Inu (Ticker: BITCOIN) is an endgame of crypto-assets (0 Tax),” reads the token’s description. “BITCOIN incentivizes the creation of novel and entertaining meme content.”

• The token’s value suddenly began to rise starting last week, from just $0.015 on July 13 to a high of $0.09 on July 20. It trades for $0.067 at writing time, with an estimated market cap of $66 million.
• The coin launched in mid-May, around the time that a mountain of memecoins began rallying in light of Pepe (PEPE)’s rise to prominence.
• It was also when BRC20 tokens started to popularize as a means of launching meme tokens on the actual Bitcoin (BTC) blockchain.
• Spinoff coins are nothing new and have at times seen some success. Shiba Inu (SHIB) was launched in 2020 as a spinoff of Dogecoin (DOGE), and briefly overtook the latter’s market cap roughly one year later.