The Cryptoconomy Is Drowning in Tokens

The number of different tokens in existence is debatable, with estimates ranging from a couple of thousand to over 80,000. All that can be agreed on is it's a lot, and the number is mushrooming with every passing month. Coinmarketcap lists over 1,500 coins and tokens, there's another 12,000 that have launched on the Waves platform plus more than 68,000 tokens that exist on Ethereum. Most of these latter tokens haven't launched, but their mere creation via smart contract is enough to sow confusion. There are 20 ERC20 variants of the petro alone.

On Wednesday, Suppoman, a Youtuber with over 140,000 subscribers, shilled Matrix Network (MAN), prompting many of his followers to rush off and buy the token. Unfortunately, several of them bought the wrong coin and mistakenly snapped up Matryx (MTX). As a result, MTX, which has a market cap of just $15 million, soared in price by 300% before rapidly correcting once investors realized their error.

"Suppoman shills Matrix and his ever-so-bright viewers pumped Matryx instead," laughed Crypto Jack, another popular Youtuber, reading out comments from his Telegram channel. "I bought 50,000 [Matryx] yesterday and [it] dropped 100% today," complained someone in the Matryx Telegram group. This wasn't the first case of mistaken token identity and it won't be the last.