‘I’m Not Trying to Be Shady’

The Barstool Sports founder today took to X (formerly Twitter) to reveal to the world that he’s learned how to trade shitcoins, and doxxed his Solana wallet to the public in the process.

“Uh oh. Davey learned how to trade shitcoin and is already up a billion percent on my 1st one!!!!!!,” he posted alongside a screenshot of a Phantom wallet with 2.68 million MONTOYA tokens—a meme coin based on the “Montoya, por favor” phrase from a “Love Island”-like Spanish reality television show, according to Know Your Meme.

Eagle-eyed crypto sleuths on X immediately matched a wallet address beginning in “5rkPD” that lined up with his trades. Subsequent posts from Portnoy, or “Davey Day Trader” as he likes to refer to himself, and a second meme coin trade confirm the wallet is indeed Portnoy’s.

Shortly after Portnoy’s post at 1:38pm ET, the MONTOYA token went from around a $2.8 million market cap to more than $10 million.

About five minutes later, blockchain data shows Portnoy sold all 2.68 million tokens in one transaction for nearly 118 SOL, the native token of the Solana network, worth almost $24,000.

“Holy shit. I have way too much power,” he posted on X a few minutes after the sale. “I made 25k by accident. This is just straight gambling,” he said. (It was only about $20K in profit, to be clear, but we can forgive the embellishment.) “This tweet turned it from 2 million to 10 million market cap in a blink.”

A Barstool employee replied to his post and urged Portnoy to “be careful,” telling him “they have your wallet address.”

Portnoy responded: “I want people to know what I’m doing. I’m not trying to be shady. That’s why I like it. People can see my every move,” referring to the transparency blockchain networks provide.

Just a little over an hour later, Davey was back in action, buying up approximately 152 SOL worth of a token called MVP, a meme coin referencing the Most Valuable Player Award win for Buffalo Bills quarterback, Josh Allen.

In less than ten minutes, he sold all his MVP coins across two transactions, bringing in more than $77,000, and netting a profit of nearly $48,000 in the process.

“I’m out. I’ve tuned 10k into 75 on shit coins today. It’s like playing the rocket game on DraftKings. I love it!!,” he said just after the sale.

For the last couple hours now since Portnoy unwittingly revealed his wallet address, Solana users have been sending the wallet large amounts of recently created Solana meme coins, often with names referencing Portnoy’s dogs or Barstool Sports.

This isn’t Portnoy’s first crypto rodeo either. Way back in August 2020, he announced he held at least $1 million in Bitcoin, only to “panic sell’ it two weeks later and admit he “fucked up [with] Bitcoin.”

Since the surprise launch of President Trump’s TRUMP meme coin in mid-January, Portnoy has been contemplating the launch of his own token, suggesting he’s spent lots of time researching coins and crypto in the process.

Earlier today, crypto media personality Nick O’Neill alleged that Portnoy was working with Solana protocol Meteora to launch a coin, which Portnoy quickly denied. O’Neill countered with what appeared to be a vague threat: “I have the actual story details. Want me to run with it or hold off and we can discuss it on stream?”

“Run it,” Portnoy replied.

He then capped off his first day in the meme coin trenches with a post mortem video for his followers. “Do you go to jail for this? Can I not do this? I think it’s legal,” he said in the video.