It’s no secret that The Pirate Bay is into cryptocurrencies. The site started accepting Bitcoin donations in 2013 and later added Litecoin and Monero.
The Pirate Bay was also the first large website to start mining cryptocurrency by using the computing resources of its visitors. This was a controversial move, but one that was followed by many other sites.
It nonetheless came as a surprise when the torrent site started promoting a “Pirate Token” out of the blue last month. While we predicted this type of move years ago, the release wasn’t initially backed by any information.
Mysterious Token Launch
The only hint was an image that linked people to Pancakeswap, a decentralized exchange where people can trade cryptocurrencies from user-generated liquidity pools. This includes Pirate Tokens, but what these tokens were for wasn’t immediately clear.
Even TPB staffers were left in the dark, noting that the site’s operator has “a history of jumping on questionable fads.”
Only after the news started circulating in the press did more information become available. The Pirate Bay added a “token” page to the site where it explained that it was a “soft launch”. In the future, the token could possibly be used to donate to moderators and uploaders, or access VIP content in the future.
At that point, the Pirate Token had a market cap of nearly a billion dollars, which adds up to a lot of donations. However, the person behind the coin still held over 99.9% in their possession. That position remains unchanged today.
Underwhelming
Looking at the activity over the past month, we have to conclude that the interest in the Pirate Token is rather underwhelming. Not just that, interest is also fading, just like the price.
When we first mentioned the project, one coin was selling for nearly $10. Today, this has dropped 80%, with the price currently sitting at $2. The broader crypto crash certainly hasn’t helped here, but looking at the number of transactions, there simply isn’t much activity.
At the time of writing there are 487 Pirate Token holders, which is fewer than a month ago. The number of transactions per day has tanked as well. There were hundreds of daily transfers earlier but that has now dropped to an average of one per day.
Token Page is Gone
Most telling, perhaps, is that the “token” page that was linked on The Pirate Bay homepage has now disappeared (archived copy). There is no longer any reference to the token on the site, as if it no longer exists.
The coin’s market cap is still a sizable $200 million at the time of writing but, needless to say, its future is quite uncertain.
Hoping to find out more, we reached out to the official contact address for the Pirate Token weeks ago. That email remains unanswered. It is certainly possible that the coin will make a revival in the future, but we wouldn’t bet on it.
