GameStop and memecoins soar as “Roaring Kitty” hints at a return

It’s the meme that launched a thousand jobs. Shares GameStop Corp and related meme coins rose Monday morning after retail trading Keith Gill—aka “TheRoaringKitty”—hinted at her return to trading, by share a meme ON X. Gill, also known as “DeepF***ingValue” on Reddit, is credited with triggering the GameStop rally of 2021, where shares of the struggling video game retailer surged 21-fold in a two-week period, before collapsing to pre-surge levels in a matter of days. Monday’s post marked the end of Gill’s 3-year hiatus.

Gamestop’s stock price rose 111% on Monday, but has since fallen to about half that value, trading at around $30 as of midday EST. Another meme stock, AMC Entertainment Holdings, increased by 12%. Meanwhile, over the past day, some meme coins appear to have gotten a jolt: GameStop GME coin, unaffiliated with the company, is up more than 1,775%, according to CoinGecko data. According to data from DEXTools, an AMC token is up more than 4,500%, as well as a cat-themed KITTY meme coin, up more than 8,000%.

The meme in question, a lanky man sitting at a desk leaning forward, symbolizes the act of “freezing”, or a period of intense concentration, with X users interpreting the post as a rallying cry to freeze in the markets commercial. “Hey bro, what are we buying,” one user He answered; “Just in time for the memecoin supercycle” another added.

DEXTools data also shows that numerous opportunistic tokens have been issued over the past day. GameStop and STONKS (slang for meme stocks) amassed more than $300,000 in market capitalization each during the first 10 hours or so of trading, while others, like TheRoaringKitty, reached less than $1,000 in liquidity.

Meme markets were abuzz after Gill’s post due to his role in the short squeeze of video game retailer GameStop in January 2021. GameStop is a U.S. physical retailer that sells video games and was widely considered to be in declining health before the rally. Its stock price has collapsed over a long period of time, from around $50 in early 2014 to just an all-time low of 64 cents in April 2020.

Gill began posting company analysis on Reddit since 2019, which went viral during the COVID pandemic. In 2021, his fame grew after he instructed an online community of retail traders to buy GameStop options and leverage their shares of the company. Within a month, the stock rose from $4 to over $120. Gill’s $53,000 investment was worth nearly $50 million at its peak, cultivating Gill’s cult status as a trader who made fortunes betting against hedge funds—in other words, playing Wall Street at its own game, comfortably from his bedroom. A hedge fund, Melvin Capital, has lost billions of dollars betting on the decline of troubled stocks like GameStop.

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