Cryptocurrency developers have created a new coin, dubbed CoronaCoin (NCOV). The intent is to help users achieve profit from the number of people who die due to the deadly coronavirus epidemic.
According to the coin’s website, the supply of Coronacoin is directly proportional to people’s mortality rate concerning the fatal virus; the price of the currency will increase as the virus kills more people.
The coronavirus is becoming more widespread globally, on Friday six new countries have reported the cases, and the World Health Organization has raised serious concerns over the epidemic and has called its impact “very high” alert.
Many businesses across the world have been affected due to the spread of the deadly virus. Besides, three major stock indexes of the U.S. are to face the worst week since 2008’s financial crisis.
Moreover, the creator of the CoronaCoin has established tokens based on the world populations and tokens will be burnt every 48 hours based on the number of people who have been infected or have died.
An admin of Telegram group for CoronaCoin Sunny Kemp said:
We developed the world’s first blockchain that tracks the spread of the virus based on it’s [sic] token supply. The token supply started at 7.6 billion and is burned every two days to keep up with official WHO statistics.”
“Some people speculate a large portion of the supply will be burned due to the spread of the virus, so they invest,” Sunny Kemp added.
When asked about other developers, Kemp said that the team is based on seven developers and more coming on board. He declined to unveil the others and said that they are mostly from Europe.
As transactions are recorded through a virtual ledger – Blockchain and the CoronaCoin records the spread of the virus whereas tokens can be bought and sold on a few online exchanges.
Kemp, who is one of the developers of the coin, said that about 20 percent of supply would be donated monthly to the Red Cross through a popular cryptocurrency payment processor.
On the other hand, CoronaCoin has been criticized by the users of Reddit, a social media platform.
One of the Reddit’s users expressed his views: “Frankly, this is amoral.”
“There has GOT to be a special place in hell, just for these investors, devs, users, everyone involved” commented another
While questioning, if the token could be viewed as morbid, Kemp stated:
“There are currently active pandemic bonds issued by the WHO. How is that different?”