it's a gimmick run by a bunch of crypto insiders swapping tokens amongst themselves (acquired for fractions of pennies) at highly inflated valuations which they themselves bid up under cover of pseudo-anonymous shell identities.

the point, which is entirely rational from their perspective, is to attract media attention and thus new sources of unsophisticated money to crypto.

It's the standard ICO scam model, but tweaked to suit an even juicier demographic.