Last month, a team of South Korean scientists claimed to have engineered a superconducting material, dubbed LK-99, that works under ambient temperature and pressure. In layman\u2019s terms, the team allegedly created a material allowing electrical currents to flow without resistance or energy loss. Previously, such types of materials were only thought to have functioned at absolute zero temperatures.<\/p>\n
But the new supposed breakthrough, which has since been replicated\u00a0(synthesis-only) by at least one other research team, is already causing a stir among the scientific and perhaps crypto community. Within days of its publication, several LK-99 memecoins have already been listed on decentralized exchange Uniswap. One such coin, the ERC-20 LK-99 token, was listed less than 24 hours ago and has already surpassed $3 million in total trading volume at the time of publication.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Memecoins have been wildly popular among crypto enthusiasts for much of this year, with tokens being created based on concepts of Pepe the Frog, Milady\u2019s nonfungible tokens collection and even ERC-20\u2019s Bitcoin \u201ccompetitor” BRC-20. Despite their often meteoric rise and fall in price, many of the tokens\u2019 developers have warned that the meme tokens they created have no intrinsic value.<\/p>\n
However, there\u2019s now a consensus among the scientific community that superconductor technology has immense value. For starters, superconductors are necessary for the construction of large-scale quantum computers. Before the yet-unverified invention, it was thought that such devices could only operate under absolute zero conditions for superconductivity.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Thus, room-temperature superconductivity would greatly help scale or accelerate the development of quantum computing. Previously, blockchain experts, such as QAN Platform chief technology officer Johann Polecsak, stated that quantum computers would eventually be able to inverse the encryption method of current cryptocurrencies in the coming decades \u2014 assuming no technological upgrades are made to such a blockchain.\u00a0<\/p>\n