The world of cryptocurrencies and blockchain has always been remarkable, and little has changed since then. A new development has emerged that is confusing traders. These are the mysterious “points” but are not usually on the blockchain. Still, a large amount of it has already been issued, and traders have even come up with ways to speculate on it.
Strange “points” new hype in crypto land
These so-called points should not be confused with “normal” tokens, where you can, for example, simply check how many there are. This is usually not possible with points; According to The Block, the information is usually not even public. Points are not on the blockchain, making it very difficult to estimate how many there are.
The block has located 115 billion points across 14 networks, but whether that is all remains to be seen. For example, the founder of Magic Eden refused to reveal exactly how many points (or in this case “diamonds”) there are. According to him, Magic Eden doesn’t even have a system for counting all the points.
Points also differ in their purpose from regular tokens. Network users earn points for doing certain things on the blockchain, such as exchanging tokens.
Points trading already exists
If you give something potential value, there will quickly be a push to trade that value. CoinDesk was able to confirm this with its own DESK token. This token no longer had any value after its introduction, the crypto newspaper did not allow this at all. Instead, it was an experiment to increase engagement with readers.
But those same readers eventually found a way to trade these mysterious “these aren’t tokens” on secondary markets. Therefore, at the end of January, CoinDesk decided to put the project on hold completely. Something similar was the case a few years ago with the Reddit token Moon (MOON), which only existed on the testnet. They usually have no value there.
However, there are several decentralized finance (DeFi) markets to earn points for other projects, such as Whales Market and Pendle Finance. With the latter, you can even achieve leverage of up to 74x your stake based on the value of the points.
But even the creators of these platforms agree that the phenomenon is remarkable. Pendle CEO TN Lee told The Block that traders do things like: Yield farming with money they borrowed from these points. That makes it particularly risky.