How is the new COVID variant affecting cryptocurrency?

While the COVID-19 pandemic has been mostly riddled with uncertainty, there is one thing we can rely on: the names of the virus and its variants and the effect they have on companies who happen to share those names. Remember all the social media jokes that the Corona beer brand was suffering because it shared a name with the virus? (It didn’t, by the way.) Or when Delta Air Lines refused to refer to the delta variant as such?

Well, now there’s a new variant making headlines, which is affecting none other than a (formerly) little-known cryptocurrency that shares the same name. Last week, the World Health Organization (WHO) put an official “variant of concern” label on the omicron variant. The cryptocurrency Omicron, which was basically unheard of on the grand scale of cryptocurrencies, saw a correlating increase in value from $65 to $675 over the three days after the announcement.

While there’s no definitive proof that the WHO’s designation caused the cryptocurrency's value to go up by more than 650 percent, the timing sure is suspect. We’re pretty sure we all know what happened here.