Reddcoin's Price Just Spiked After John McAfee Tweeted About It

The price of Reddcoin, a largely unheard of cryptocurrency, has spiked over 650 percent in the last week, with most of that jump coming in the last 24 hours. A nearly vertical climb came on the heels of John McAfee, creator of McAfee Antivirus and 2016 Libertarian Party presidential hopeful, posting on Twitter that it was his “coin of the day.”

On December 18, Reddcoin (RDD) had a market cap of roughly $80.5 million and each Reddcoin was worth $0.002804. At the time of this writing, its market cap is $529.7 million with a price of $.018460.

Reddcoin was designed for use on social media platforms, created with microtransactions in mind as payments for content creators on tipbots on sites like Reddit, where the cryptocurrency took its name. Its creators

It also boasts a more environmentally friendly featureset compared to Bitcoin’s electricity-intensive proof-of-work mining process, which has received criticism recently. Reddcoins, in contrast, can be earned through “minting,” which can be achieved on an ordinary laptop or cell phone processor, rather than requiring expensive, energy-intensive and frequently outdated graphics card-based mining rigs from cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum.

McAfee’s tweet and the subsequent near-immediate price skyrocket highlight issues that continue to plague the cryptocurrency marketplace, such as the prevalence of pump and dump schemes and how large actors can quickly influence the shape of the entire market. It is impossible to know, for instance, if McAfee himself immediately sold off his Reddcoin holdings immediately after the price spike. If he did, all he had to do was send a tweet, wait for the price to raise, and sell in order to make an easy profit.

In general, Reddcoin is benefiting from increased interest in cryptocurrencies following Bitcoins meteoric rise this past year — notwithstanding its recent price tumble. Although the coin appears to not have received active development for a while now, the increased interest recently may see it pick up. It could also benefit as users look to alternatives to Patreon for microtransactions for content creators, after Patreon changed its policy to take a larger cut of smaller transactions. Patreon ultimately reversed course on the planned change a week later following outcry from creators and backers, but significant reputational damage was done in the process, so users might be willing to move to a decentralized cryptocurrency-based model.