While widely written off equally a scam before this twelvemonth, Richard Heart'due south controversial HEX is fast approaching a $one billion market place cap.

Co-ordinate to crypto analytics site CoinMarketCap, the HEX token had a market cap of over $979 million on May 14 with a value of $0.006 at the time of writing. Prior to mid-February, the value of the coin was so small, many sites simply couldn't mensurate information technology.

HEX is an ERC-20 token that pays holders for rewards instead of miners, essentially a crypto version of a traditional stock-still deposit account. Users tin can lock up funds, and then receive their investment plus interest when the term matures.

At that place are currently just nine exchanges that offer trading on HEX. On Uniswap, the Ethereum decentralized substitution, the 24-hour volume for HEX was $two.4 million, while on Hotbit it was close to $900,000. The remaining exchanges accept very low liquidity, including Coinsbit, Bidesk, p2b2b and Bitcoin.com.

A sudden surge?

The question is: why this surge in value for a token that almost of the crypto media has derided as worthless, if not an outright scam?

True believers on crypto Twitter point to the fact that whales have staked a lot in HEX, and the nature of the token's rewards benefits the stakers, non the miners:

Some users, tribal though they may be when information technology comes to crypto, ultimately see the token as reliable, pointing to the high returns of early stakers, "Is Hex is a skilful investment this early on? To me, as an investor, yes. I am up 35x."

Others but say HEX detractors are too quick to dismiss the token as a scam instead of doing their research and listening to Center explain himself, essentially accusing them of confirmation bias.

The HEX founder wrote on Twitter that HEX reached an all-time high price on May 14 and is looking at a $ane.1 billion marketplace cap by the end of 2022. He said that for those concerned with the current financial crunch, the token has "basically less than 0% inflation to the staker class on boilerplate."

Some are still on the contend. I user thinks the crypto community'southward reaction to HEX could make up one's mind how time to come coins and innovations are received:

"I feel the crypto community has been through and so many scams... when something practiced comes forth for the holder we are blinded. Time volition tell how good hex is…"

Still labeled a scam past many

HEX'south critics are legion. Peter McCormack, the host of the podcast "What Bitcoin Did," has repeatedly referred to Center as a fraud and HEX a scam.

As Cointelegraph has reported, others accept attacked Centre for HEX'due south privacy and security concerns regarding its challenge process. Vlad Costea, a author at Bitcoin Magazine, presented a range of arguments against HEX's purported legitimacy in January 2022, saying the cryptocurrency "resembles a Ponzi scheme" and was more like "fool'south aureate".

Center spoke to Cointelegraph in Dec, admitting the HEX project uses "tactics a scam might use," but ultimately assertive the stigma was due to people in the crypto customs being loyal to certain coins:

"In crypto, there'southward a tribalism that every money yous buy is a world-irresolute amazing thing. Every coin anyone else buys is a scam by default."