Dave Portnoy claims he collects memecoins “as a hobby,” even though he’s earned at least $70,000 and promoted five tokens that have declined at least 97%.
Portnoy started his career covering sports and pizza shops, then started daytrading to keep his gambling audience entertained during the COVID-19 sports shutdown.
Nowadays, he’s a proudly degenerate crypto promoter who has pumped and issued memecoins and even lists them in his X bio.
For example, he promoted MONTOYA at 1:38pm New York time at a market cap of $2.75 million, and it hit $9.95 million within two minutes.
The Solana-based token, named after a participant in a Spanish TV show Love Island, has declined 99.7% to under $25,000 as of publication time.
Portnoy’s original memecoin was Stool Prisondente, ticker symbol JAILSTOOL. Somebody purposefully misspelled his X username, StoolPresidente, as a joke to taunt the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.
Historically, these regulators enforced against certain forms of pump-and-dump schemes. Defiant, Portnoy found the name amusing enough to buy and pump it on social media.
His flagship token was worth $217 million on February 9, 2025. Today, JAILSTOOL has declined 97% to under $7 million.
Read more: SEC busts VanEck for using Dave Portnoy to pump BUZZ ETF
More Dave Portnoy memecoins down 99%
Portnoy also promoted GREED and GREED2. GREED has declined 99.9% from its $37 million high to under $50,000 today. Similarly, GREED2 has plummeted 99.5% from $5.8 million to under $25,000.
The Barstool Sports supremo also promoted KOLHAT, which has dropped 99.8% from $3 million to under $10,000. Another of his memecoins, LIBRADICK, has shed 99.8%, dropping from $14 million to under $25,000.
It doesn’t take much research to spot a trend in the long-term performance of Portnoy’s favored tokens.
Indeed, last week, renowned crypto sleuth ZachXBT reminded Portnoy’s followers that five of his coins have crashed by over 99%.
For promoters like Portnoy, it’s not hard to make money when pre-buying and promoting tokens that quickly pump and then dump 97-99%.
Not only does he get away with taunting the SEC and promoting multiple memecoins that are now nearly worthless, he even gets refunds for mistakes.
For example, he bought a fake version of Argentinian President Javier Milei’s LIBRA token. Although he lost $5 million on the trade, the LIBRA team refunded him for his loss.
