LUCKNOW (CoinChapter.com) — Over the past couple of days, the price of the Solana-based GameStop (GME) memecoin has skyrocketed by over 2,700%. However, the coin has no affiliation with the actual company. The recent GME Memecoin spike came as the GameStop stock price itself surged 204%.
Boredom and FOMO Drive GameStop Memecoin Mania
The rallies followed the return of Keith Gill, the Reddit trader whose “Roaring Kitty” persona helped spark the GameStop mania in 2021. Gill reactivated his long-dormant YouTube and Twitter accounts on May 12. He posted a cryptic meme signaling his first online activity in nearly three years. And when the GameStop mania spilled over into crypto markets, opportunistic traders were ready to pump any vaguely relevant token they could find.
People are bored and are taking any little sign of hope they can.
said pseudonymous crypto trader Daan Crypto Trades.
If the price moves up and people don’t know why, they will think of narratives to support and explain why the price is doing what it does.
Daan said further, adding the 2021 GameStop “saga is still on a lot of people’s minds.”
The excitement generated around GameStop memecoin demonstrates there’s capital out there that’s not being allocated.
said Ed Hindi, chief investment officer at crypto fund Tyr Capital explained other reason behind GameStop mania.
Memecoins Outperform as Market Chases Narratives
Indeed, despite the colossal gains in certain GameStop memecoin, many other major “meme tokens” like Dogecoin and Shiba Inu saw relatively muted price reactions. Both of these tokens spiked on May 12 but have been going down since then. The price of DOGE and SHIB are down by 1.2% and 0.47%, respectively, over the last 24 hours.
Only a handful of other tokens like PEPE and Floki managed to sustain meaningful upside over the same period. These two tokens rose by 42.63% and 11.27% respectively in the last seven days respectively.
This highly selective pumping suggests traders are chasing very specific, short-term narratives rather than expressing overall confidence in the market’s direction.
Investors are overreacting to short-term trends like the GameStop event precisely because the market is quiet at the moment. We need a new overarching narrative in the crypto markets.
said Ed Hindi
Broader market sentiment has indeed cooled in recent weeks. Over the past month, the popular Fear and Greed Index has dropped around 10 points to a “Greed” score of 64.
Not everyone believes the market lacks compelling narratives, however. Patrick Scott, founder of crypto firm Dynamo DeFi, argues there are plenty of legitimate investment theses playing out—they’re just being overshadowed by the sideshow antics of meme-crazed speculators.
“There’s no shortage of narratives,” Scott said. He pointed to the growth of tokenized real-world assets and heightened activity on scalable Layer 1 networks like Solana as key trends underpinning long-term value formation in crypto markets.
