Top Weirdest Cryptocurrencies Ever Made

With over 8,300 cryptocurrency coins and tokens, you might be forgiven if you didn't know why most of them exist anyway. Here we look at the weirdest cryptocurrencies ever created and tell you what has happened since their unveiling.

Unobtanium

What a name for a cryptocurrency you might be wondering, with the next question likely being whether this is a periodic element.

Well, the word Unobtanium has been in use since the 1950s and got hyped by the Avatar movie. It is supposed to be a fictional 'rare' material and the cryptocurrency is trying to live that "reality."

At release, developers held a fair distribution of the native token UNO, but like the hypothetical material, chose to limit supply to just 250,000 coins. As such, UNO is one of the scarcest cryptocurrencies, with all the coins to be mined in 300 years.

The Unobtanium coin was forked from Bitcoin (BTC) and launched on October 18, 2013. The notable thing about UNO is that the cryptocurrency is still active and traded on exchanges such as Latoken and HitBTC. As of February 16, 2021, UNO was trading at around $53.95.

  • Launch date: October 2013
  • Status: Active
  • CoinMarketCap rank: #3203

Coinye

Coinye, or Coinye West was a fun cryptocurrency its developers said was meant for non-programmers and the global hip hop community.

But a token its creators noted was going to be great for the ticketing industry lived for a grand lifespan of seven short months.

The fun started in January and by July 2014, Coinye West was no more, thanks to none other than Kanye West. The Chicago rapper didn't buy into the idea of an altcoin with his name and image. He sued the developers, the beginning of the end for the altcoin. After the lawsuit was filed, the developers changed the coin's name and logo, with the latter a fish-like mascot with sunglasses but still visibly the face of Kanye West.

But the scrypt-based cryptocurrency didn't go down just like that: it opened for trading and even allegedly surged to highs of $1,000 per unit.

Sadly, it's been confined to the archives and we can only imagine what it would have been like having a Coinye altcoin.

  • Launch date: January 2014
  • Status: Inactive (defunct)
  • CoinMarketCap rank: NA

Cthulhu Offerings

This could be the creepiest yet of the weird cryptocurrencies ever released. It was based on the works of H.P. Lovecraft, a horror writer. Specifically, Cthulhu Offerings (OFF) looks at the creepy creature from the story "The Call of Cthulhu" as "The Great Old One" that needs offerings and sacrifices as time draws near for their coming. In return, users get "blessings" which basically refers to the block reward.

The call for users was made via these words: "join us in our ritual", in this case referring to the launch and distribution of OFF tokens.

Cthulhu Offerings was launched in September 2013 and is a proof of work (PoW) cryptocurrency that uses the Quark algorithm.

Despite the bizarre nature of its "cultist" language, OFF got off to a good start in the early years. At one point OFF traded as high as $0.0041, with supply reaching 1.8 million coins. According to CoinMarketCap, there is not data relating to OFF price, supply, or market cap.

  • Launch date: September 2013
  • Status: Inactive
  • CoinMarketCap rank: NA

PizzaCoin

May 22, 2010, is an unofficial holiday in the Bitcoin calendar and January 25, 2014, looked to take the events of that day a step higher in the list of most memorable Bitcoin-related events.

Well, not related to PizzaCoin, but all the same mighty close is the day developer Laszlo Hanyecz paid 10,000 BTC for two Papa John's pizzas. It became Bitcoin Pizza Day, and here was PizzaCoin a little over three years later.

izzaCoin (PIZZA) was a cryptocurrency its developers dedicated to, you guessed it right – pizza. The popular finally dish had a cryptocurrency in its name.

PizzaCoin is a Proof-of-Work (PoW) cryptocurrency based on the X11 algorithm. The total supply is 1 billion PIZZA, with circulating supply currently at 30,976,128 PIZZA coins. The price of PIZZA against the US dollar today is $0.025052 and the market cap stands at $776,001.

  • Launch date: January 2014
  • Status: Active
  • CoinMarketCap rank: #1540

UFOCoin

Don't think about alien technology or such other extraterrestrial phenomenon. UFOCoin, short for Uniform Fiscal Object, has nothing to do with any of that. But it's weird how the developers made it appear so with the apt 'UFO' coin.

So what's this UFOCoin all about?

UFOCoin is a mineable coin that uses the NeoScrypt algorithm and had its genesis block on February 11, 2014. It has a maximum supply of 4 billion UFO, with 3,921,107.160 currently circulating. Uniform Fiscal Object currently trades at $0.00029 and has a market cap of $1.13 million.

The developer of this coin, including former BTC miner Peter Bushnell, designed it to be a P2P protocol for decentralized storage and transfer of value.

For that reason, the UFOCcoin blockchain is quite fast, with block time set at 90 seconds. If you mined this PoW coin, you would get a block reward of 650 UFO coins. Not bad for a cryptocurrency that is still active despite the lack of interest over the past several years.

  • Launch date: February 2014
  • Status: Active
  • CoinMarketCap rank: #1445

Dogecoin

Dogecoin is arguably the most famous of the weird group of cryptocurrencies. How do you classify a cryptocurrency created as a joke and based on a 2013 sensation- the Doge meme? Weird would be the word, right?

The open-source p2p cryptocurrency forked that features a Japanese Shiba Inu dog has attracted a large base of users and supporters over the years. The most famous today is Tesla CEO Elon Musk, whose tweets have recently seen the DOGE price skyrocket. Other celebrities have also joined on the bandwagon of the 'feel-good' coin, seeing the cryptocurrency post massive success.

As well as the growing list of celebrities, a robust group of retail users calling themselves the Dogecoin Army has been established. The biggest chunk of this is on Reddit, a platform that first made the "joke" coin popular as an internet tipping currency.

But although it's amusing for a cryptocurrency created for fun to be having a market cap as huge as Dogecoin's in 2021, its use has grown to belie the original intent of its creators.

No better example illustrates this than the 2014 use of Dogecoin to donate over $50,000 to a Jamaican bobsled team headed for the Winter Olympics. It's a weird coin, but that might not be for long.

DOGE price today (Feb. 16, 2021) is $0.054; trading volume stands at $3.3 billion and market cap is $6.93 billion.

Learn more about Dogecoin (DOGE).

  • Launch date: 2013
  • Status: Active
  • CoinMarketCap rank: #13

Conclusion

There have been some weird cryptocurrencies in the market, and what's clear is that these might not be the last of the lot. However, as has been shown by Dogecoin, fun, and weird can sometimes make sense. Do you have a favorite among the bizarre coins? Share your views.