Full-on meme fever

Three years ago, Keith Gill, the investor behind the Covid-era meme stock craze, went silent.

Now Gill's recent and unexpected return to the town square has helped launch scores of memecoin rallies.

The biggest memecoin of them all, Dogecoin, gained as much as 6.2% after Gill, better known on X as Roaring Kitty, posted an image of a man hunched forward in his chair with a joystick device. It's a crude sketch of a meme used by gamers to convey "locking in," or, in other words, that it's time to get serious.

And thus GME, a four-month-old coin with no connection to GameStop, rocketed 1,400% on Monday.

Shares of video game retailer GameStop surged by as much as 111% with trading having to be halted at times.

GME (the token) now has a market capitalization of roughly $125 million, putting it just inside the ranks of the Top 400 coins, per CoinGecko. GME's per coin price sits at about a penny-and-a-half.

Meanwhile, one of the largest-capitalized, most popular memecoins, Pepe, earlier today hit a fresh record high of $0.00001096 after a gain of 22% in 24 hours. PEPE, 27th-largest coin, running on Ethereum, has doubled in value since mid-April.

Among some of the larger Solana-run memecoins, we find Bonk (No. 61) and dogwifhat (No. 39) each up 3%-4% in the past day.

Meanwhile, a barely traded coin named Roaring Kitty rallied, as did several cat-themed coins, including Popcat.

GME Stonks. GameOver. KeithGillWifHat. These are the names of a handful of more than 20,000 memecoins minted on Solana's pump.fun protocol in just the past 48 hours, according to Dune data.

A hastily concocted Wolverine-related token, Roaring Wolverine, has already crashed, Decrypt said.

Some 500,000 tokens have been created via pump.fun since its January release.

"Today is a good day for cats," the pump.fun team chirped yesterday on its official X account in a nod to Roaring Kitty's return.

Although let the record show it was not a good day for Shark Cat (SC) which fell 28% in 24 hours. Even Catcoin, after a little purring, tumbled 11% over the past day.

Solana, despite its newfound status as meme central station, is trading sideways over the past day. SOL is down 5% since last Tuesday.

Bitcoin and Ethereum each declined 2%-3% in the past 24 hours as speculative enthusiasm flooded into more obscure corners of the cryptosphere. Indeed, the bolt-from-the-blue resurgence of a social media pied piper helped push up the price of meme tokens galore.

Now what?

Keith Gill, a.k.a. Roaring Kitty, was at the center of the 2021 GameStop short squeeze aimed at large hedge funds betting on that company's demise. Gill's posts on Wallstreetbets, a Reddit subcategory, set off a craze, marshaling trading app users like some retail Zulu army. GameStop’s stock soared 1,000% in less than a month. Gill wound up testifying (virtually) before Congress and the entire affair was turned into a movie, “Dumb Money.”

But just like that, Roaring Kitty, per an Associated Press report, vanished from messaging boards. A kiss-off video in June 2021 depicted kittens falling asleep.

Now that the loudest of meme thumpers has reemerged, points out pseudonymous trader Travis on X, crypto should brace for a new wave of “degens” to start buying memecoins.

Josh Gilbert, an analyst at eToro, told Cointelegraph that he thinks Roaring Kitty will ignite some short-term moves, but “it’s hard to see any longevity,” he added.

An army of retail traders helped thrust BTC to record heights (just shy of $70K) back in November of 2021. But when the largest crypto reached a brand new record, of about $73.7K, this past March, the level of trading volume on Coinbase was not even half of what it was during that prior record run-up some 30 months ago.

"The retail investor was in the driver's seat of that wild 2021 ride," Reuters said.

It was a period marked by COVID lockdowns, stimulus checks and rock-bottom borrowing costs.

By way of contrast, the latest BTC rally occurred in a high interest rate environment, and was a "more solemn, institutional affair" spurred by the arrival of spot ETFs in U.S.

And so there is a million-dollar question flummoxing crypto right now, points out Michael Rinko, an analyst at Delphi Digital: "When will retail traders come back?"