Is the GameStop meme stock craze returning?

Is the meme stock craze returning? The price of GameStop shares has doubled from Friday’s close to Monday’s open, with GME trading paused nine times due to volatility. Additionally, the meme token themed around GameStop on Solana has also seen significant growth.

The ‘GameStop’ token on Solana, which also uses the GME ticker, experienced a price surge of 1,900 percent in the last 24 hours, according to DexScreener data. The market capitalization of the token is around $50 million. GME on Solana, which is an unofficial meme token created as a tribute to the company, was launched in January shortly after the game retailer announced it would withdraw from the crypto world, shutting down its NFT marketplace that was launched back in 2022.

If you traded in January 2021, this is exactly how it looked. One day, the stock doubles, you think it can’t move anymore, and then it trades +150 percent in pre-market. And it just keeps doing that, over and over again. Short squeeze,’diamond hands’ HODL crowd, WallStreetBets retards/monkeys, it’s all coming back. All because one guy posted a bunch of memes on Twitter/X. Rate cuts, huh, President Powell? Probably not – wrote macroeconomist Vuk Vuković on LinkedIn.

Like most meme tokens, GME had a brief peak period. Meme tokens are often created based on internet memes and pop culture trends, but they are also often created by anonymous developers and can be so-called rug pulls where liquidity is drained, leaving buyers with nearly worthless tokens.

The GME token rose to $0.0135 in early February, fluctuating up and down for weeks before finally losing strength and sinking lower and lower. Before this latest jump, GME had barely moved in price for weeks, trading at around $0.0005.

The unofficial GameStop token is still about 26 percent lower than its all-time high but is currently closer to that record than it has been in the past three months. A 24-hour jump of about 1,900 percent is significantly higher than the actual price of GameStop shares.

In early 2021, the massive rise in GameStop stock prices was sparked by stock trader Keith Gill, better known as Roaring Kitty and DeepFuckingValue, through posts on Reddit and live streams, encouraging traders to buy and hold shares of the retail giant. The trend then spread to other nostalgic, beleaguered brands, such as the AMC theater chain.

The initial frenzy eventually died down, but it seems we are witnessing a revival following Gill’s post on X, the first in nearly three years. GME has more than doubled from Friday’s closing price, while AMC jumped 37 percent.