GameStop Trading Paused Nine Times as Roaring Kitty Return Drives Meme Rally

Meme coins and tokens surged early Monday after an internet figure who inspired the 2021 GameStop rally posted for the first time in years.

Keith Gill, aka Roaring Kitty or DeepFuckingValue, who helped fuel the 2021 rally via Reddit posts and livestreams, posted to Twitter (aka X) an image of a man leaning forward in a chair while holding a video game controller. It was his first tweet in nearly three years.

The post hints that meme stocks and cryptocurrencies may be due for a rally again—or at least that’s how traders are taking it.

The price of GameStop (GME) shares more than doubled from the close of business Friday to the markets opening Monday—and the surge in demand prompted Nasdaq to halt trading nine times already this morning. Fellow 2021 meme stock AMC, the movie theater chain, has also jumped by 33% today, while adjacent stocks like Reddit and Robinhood are also gaining.

Back in 2021, Roaring Kitty posted about gains he had made buying shares from failing businesses like GameStop—which had been shorted by top investment firms. His posts prompted people to join in, eventually leading to Wall Street chaos due to shares suddenly going up in value.

The 2021 craze led to a surge in so-called meme stocks: shares in companies that become popular on internet forums. Cryptocurrencies experienced a boom as a result, too, with top meme coins and tokens going up in value. They are now a key part of the crypto ecosystem, and have surged this year as part of Bitcoin’s rally.

And today they’re up even more. Of the top meme coins by market cap, Dogecoin—the Elon Musk favorite—is leading the charge: it’s up nearly 6%, trading hands for $0.15, according to CoinGecko.

Meanwhile, other popular but small cap tokens like the Ethereum-based Pepe and Floki are both up over 8%.

Edited by Andrew Hayward