Meme cryptos soared on Monday after a popular GameStop trader who drove the 2021 meme craze posted for the first time in around three years.
Keith Gill, better known by his online alias Roaring Kitty (or DeepFuckingValue), posted a cryptic meme on the X (aka Twitter) platform. The post displays an image of a man holding a video game controller while leaning forward in a chair as if to indicate he’s taking the game seriously. For traders, the post suggests that meme stocks and crypto assets may be due for another parabolic rally.
The price of GameStop (GME) shares surged as much as 110% on Monday, with Nasdaq being forced to halt trading multiple times due to unprecedented demand.
The original craze eventually faded, but a revival appears on the horizon after the meme hero’s resurfacing.
So… Who’s Roaring Kitty?
Gill, who worked as a Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance marketer, posted the gains he had made from buying shares from dramatically undervalued businesses like GameStop. In 2019, he bought $53,000 worth of GameStop stock.
Notably, his posts on social media prompted several small-time traders to join in, leading to a meme stock frenzy as shares suddenly skyrocketed in value. When GameStop’s stock price peaked at $483 per share in January 2021, Roaring Kitty’s investment was valued at nearly $50 million.
Around this same time, traders started rushing to canine-themed crypto Dogecoin (DOGE), which was trading for $0.01 in Jan. 2021 and jumped past the $0.50 mark that May before retracing. Elon Musk’s favorite crypto, DOGE, is up 5.3% at press time, valued at $0.1496.
The frenzy spurred by Gill in 2021 prompted reviews from the United States Securities and Exchange Commission, the attorneys general of New York and Texas, and ultimately a U.S. Congressional hearing.
An unaffiliated Solana memecoin created to commemorate the events surrounding the GameStop saga also suddenly rallied today following Gill’s X post. The $GME token has seen a 1,800% price leap over the last 24 hours, according to data from DexScreener, to a current price of roughly $0.01. It boasts a market cap of $67 million.
In the meantime, smaller-cap meme coins such as Ethereum-based Pepe (PEPE) and Floki (FLOKI) are up 14.49% and 6.9%, respectively.
