This Week in Coins: GameStop Surge Spurs Meme Coin Mania, and Bitcoin Ends on a High – Decrypt

What a week it’s been.

The Sunday night return of Roaring Kitty led to a trading frenzy, with meme stocks and digital coins and tokens alike surging.

The internet star and financial analyst posted on Twitter (aka X) for the first time in nearly three years. By Monday morning, the price of GameStop had gone through the roof as traders decided to snap up the original meme stock.

Roaring Kitty—real name Keith Gill, aka DeepFuckingValue on Reddit—started the meme stock trading craze back in 2021, inspiring amateur traders to buy up dying company shares.

His Sunday post caused traders to want to get in on the action again. GameStop stock has since taken a plunge as the short-lived frenzy faded, but at one point this week was up over 200%, NYSE data shows.

Roaring Kitty’s comeback also led to a surge in meme coin trading. As is usually the case, the world of crypto provided even bigger gains for traders than the stock market.

Solana-based tribute token GME went through the roof, hitting new highs before dipping sharply again. It’s still up a huge amount, and is now trading for $0.0046—a seven-day rise of 707%. Solana itself is the biggest gainer in the top 10 coins by market cap, meanwhile, up 19% on the week to $172 as of this writing.

Major cryptocurrencies like Dogecoin also rose on the return of the craze. The 10th biggest digital asset has put up solid gains this week, up 6% currently at a price of $0.152. But smaller cap memes are some of the biggest gainers. Floki and Pepe have jumped 17% and 10% this past week, respectively.

And who can forget Bitcoin? The asset had been on a slow climb until, on Wednesday, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics dropped data showing that inflation wasn’t as high as expected in April.

That increases the chance of a rate cut from the Fed this year—and is bullish for the biggest digital asset. The price of Bitcoin is now at $66,830, up 10% in seven days, according to CoinGecko—the highest since the halving event in April.

Edited by Andrew Hayward