People Are Selling Digital Socks for $92,000 on Ethereum's Uniswap

The price of Unisocks (SOCKS) has reached a new all-time high of over $92,000. These digital socks are “memeful” crypto tokens issued by decentralized exchange Uniswap (UNI).

What can owning one get you? Well, a physical pair of socks. And that’s it.

“500 pairs of digital socks have a market cap of $20 million. Memes are the new money,” tweeted Meltem Demirors, chief strategy officer at Coinshares, on Tuesday.

At press time, SOCKS are trading at around $64,600, down 24.6% on the day, according to crypto metrics platform CoinGecko.

How did this all start?

In 2019, Uniswap created 500 SOCKS tokens. The original idea was that they are “backed” by the same amount of physical, limited-edition pairs of socks. But they also came with a unique price scale.

The very first SOCKS token was listed for $12, but the price of each subsequent sale has been increasing according to a dynamic curve since then. This has led to the current, absurd price high.

At the end of January, Unisocks were trading at around $12,625. But their price skyrocketed up to over $92,000 on February 16. This means that the market capitalization of SOCKS peaked at around $28 million at the time.

Notably, the surge coincided with Uniswap itself becoming the first DeFi trading platform to generate over $100 billion in volume.

“Uniswap just became the first decentralized trading platform to process over $100b in volume - an exciting milestone for DeFi,” Uniswap’s founder Hayden Adams tweeted on February 16.

To turn their tokens into socks, Unisock holders must redeem their tokens, taking them out of circulation. According to Unisocks' website, there are currently only 315 SOCKS tokens left out of 500 in circulation, so 185 crypto enthusiasts have already redeemed their pretty expensive footwear.

As Decrypt reported, Ethereum-based, non-fungible tokens CryptoPunks are also selling for outrageous sums of money, with the latest pixelated picture of a male “punk” being auctioned off for 78 ETH (roughly $150,000).

And it wasn’t even backed by a real, physical punk’s head.