Memecoins
Lucky timing? Solana Meme Coin “Roaring Kitty” Skyrockets After GameStop Trader Returns
A Solana meme coin named after the stock trader and meme influencer Roaring kitten it sat dormant for weeks, flattening out to almost no value. Then suddenly it takes its name reappeared online Sunday after years of silence, causing the token’s price to soar more than 13,000% in just a few hours to a market capitalization of tens of millions of dollars.
The token, KITTEN—created by an anonymous and eponymous “Crypto Twitter Cabal” in late March— briefly jumped to a price of around $0.02 soon after its creation. Shortly thereafter, the value plummeted to almost zero. For weeks, however, KITTY’s social media accounts have been promising that the nascent token would soon become the “biggest comeback story of 2024,” with some unnamed event set to change its fortunes.
“We will see massive buying soon,” says the token’s Twitter account published on May 6th.
Promoters of meme coins routinely make such lofty promises. But less than a week later, the unthinkable happened: KITTY’s prophecy truly came true.
Sunday, a Twitter account belonging to Keith Gill, aka Roaring Kitty, the architect of the famous Reddit-fueled GameStop stock short squeeze of 2021, has posted for the first time in three years, sending all the stocks associated with the meme boom soaring.
GameStop (GME) stock value tripled for a short time; GME, which is also the ticker of a Solana-based tribute coin, rallied slightly 1,900%; and KITTY, in a matter of moments, rebounded from near worthlessness to a market capitalization of around $40 million.
The benefits of Roaring Kitty’s apparent surprise return to Twitter, after three years of radio silence across all social media channels, were immediate and immense, in KITTY’s case.
Within a 24-hour period on Solana Decentralized Exchanges (DEX) Raydio AND killer whale, According to DexScreener, KITTY had a trading volume of over $60 million. Since reaching those highs last Tuesday, however, KITTY has fallen to a market capitalization of $19.3 million at the time of writing.
While the sudden return of Roaring Kitty on Sunday came as a surprise, and was of obvious and particular importance to the team behind KITTY, the token’s social media accounts did not appear particularly surprised by the development. They simply posted the news and began enthusiastically tweeting the token address at a much faster rate.
Decipher reached out to the Roaring Kitty coins team regarding their affiliation with Keith Gill and any prior knowledge they may have had regarding Roaring Kitty’s reappearance online, but did not immediately receive a response.
KITTY is part of a flurry of meme coins affiliated with public figures, pop culture, and internet memes that have gained steam in the last months. Such tokens can quickly accumulate millions of dollars in value on the back of related news, but they tend to (eventually) meet the same fate: plummeting to zero.