Solana’s GME Soars 14-Fold as ‘Roaring Kitty’ GameStop Commenter Returns

Keith Gills, a.k.a. Roaring Kitty, tweeted a meme on Sunday of a gamer becoming serious, ending a roughly three-year hiatus from the social media platform.

GME, a memecoin cryptocurrency on Solana inspired by the ticker of GameStop’s common stock, soared Monday after highly-influential GameStop investor and commenter Keith Gill, who goes by the name Roaring Kitty on X and YouTube, came back to X after an almost three-year hiatus from social media. 

Solana’s GME, which first started trading at the end of January, has increased 1,418% in the past 24 hours to trade as high as $0.015 before settling at $0.0074 at press time, data from blockchain analytics firm Birdeye shows.

The Solana-based GM has a $101.53 million 24-hour trading volume, making it the fourth-most traded cryptocurrency on Solana by volume, behind SOL, USDC, and USDT, per Birdeye. In contrast, the traditional finance counterpart of Solana’s GME has generated over $170.6 million in trading volume on the day, and had risen 74% on Monday to $30.47 from Friday’s closing price of $17.46, according to Yahoo Finance. 

Despite Solana’s GME far outpacing its TradFi counterpart, the cryptocurrency GME has a market cap of roughly $46 million, which pales in comparison to TradFi stock GME’s market cap of $8.9 billion.

The spectacular rise of Solana’s GME followed Gill posting a meme yesterday evening of a gamer sitting up and getting serious, colloquially known as “locking in.” GME on Solana’s rise was accompanied by a boost to a number of other tokens, such as GaemStap and GME on layer 2 network Base.

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— Roaring Kitty (@TheRoaringKitty) May 13, 2024

Gill’s Rise

Gill is an investor who rose to prominence for his posts analyzing GameStop stock on the subreddit r/wallstreetbets under the screen name “DeepFuckingValue.” Gill was particularly active on social media during the GameStop short squeeze in 2021, which not only saw the price of GameStop’s common stock soar but was also a movement designed to bring pain to the modern-day financial establishment. 

According to a screenshot Gill posted on Reddit, Gil turned what he claimed was a  roughly $53,000 initial investment GameStop call options into $11.2 million. 

Regarding Solana’s GME way outperforming the stock GME, CEO of crypto fund Asymmetric Joe McCann said on X, “Wait until retail finds out about the actual memecoin casino. It’s not the stock market anymore, and it’s open 24/7 to everyone worldwide.”