GameStop Meme Coins Are Taking Over Solana as Pump.fun Sets Record

By André Beganski

The return of Keith Gill, a man closely linked to GameStop’s stock rally in 2021, has unleashed a massive flood of Solana-based meme coins through the pump.fun protocol. 

GME Stonks, GameOver, and KiethGillWifHat are just a few examples of tokens launched through pump.fun in the last 24 hours after Gill—a financial analyst and investor also known as Roaring Kitty—posted a meme on Twitter, resurfacing for the first time in years.

Allowing anyone to launch a meme coin for only 0.02 SOL ($3), pump.fun notched its busiest day of deployments on Sunday after Gill posted an image of a man hunched forward in a chair with a video game controller in hand. In all, 14,500 different meme coins were launched via pump.fun that day, setting a new record, according to a Dune dashboard.

Appearing to match Sunday’s pace of new Solana tokens, over 7,400 were also created through pump.fun on Monday, as of this writing. On Twitter, the pump.fun account appeared to reference Gill’s cat-themed moniker and an influx of associated tokens when it said, “Today is a good day for cats, that's for sure.”

Pump.fun also acknowledged the not-so-good side of meme coins as well, such as how the value of the volatile assets can plummet due to “rug pulls.” The pump.fun team asked Gill on Twitter if he was “interested in grifting [on his] followers with a coin launch,” effectively inviting him to join in.

Whether anonymous developers simply added an image of a hat to Gill or employed a popular misspelling of words, Monday’s Gill- and GameStop-themed coins added to the growing list of 512,000 tokens deployed using the Solana protocol. Since pump.fun’s January release, those launches have resulted in around 127,000 SOL or $19 million in revenue for the protocol in the form of gas fees.

Some Solana-based tokens drew inspiration from videos Gill posted Monday after his initial reappearance. For example, playing off of the inclusion of the Marvel superhero Wolverine in one, a token named Roaring Wolverine was launched—and appears to have already crashed. 

Once known for making frequent, top-rated posts on Reddit’s r/WallStreetBets, Gill is credited with corralling thousands of traders in 2020 to bet against Wall Street through one of its most shorted stocks. Following a historic short squeeze that sent GameStop share price skyrocketing to $483, however, the figure of modern financial folklore largely faded from the public’s view.

As GameStop’s stock surged on Wall Street Monday following Gill’s reemergence, trading was halted several times. Meanwhile, a Solana-based token that borrowed GameStop’s ticker name increased nearly 1,700% along with others inspired by the meme stock craze.

Edited by Ryan Ozawa.

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