GameStop Trading Halts Nine Times As Roaring Kitty Returns Drives Meme Rally

Meme coins and tokens soared Monday morning after an internet image that inspired a 2021 GameStop rally was posted for the first time in years.

Keith Gill, aka Roaring Kitty or DeepFuckingValue, who helped fuel the 2021 rally through Reddit posts and live streams, posted a picture of a man leaning on a chair holding a video game controller on Twitter (at X). It was his first tweet in nearly three years.

The post suggests that stocks and cryptocurrencies could be due for another rally – or at least that's how traders are taking it.

The price of GameStop ( GME ) doubled from the close of business to Monday's opener — and the surge in demand caused the Nasdaq to halt trading nine times this morning. 2021 MM stock AMC, the movie theater chain, also jumped 33% today, while neighboring stocks like Reddit and Robinhood are also gaining.

In the year In 2021, Roaring Kitty posted about profits from buying shares in failed businesses like GameStop—which were shorted by top investment firms. His posts inspired people to join in, eventually leading to chaos on Wall Street.

In the year The craze of 2021 has led to a surge in so-called meme stocks: shares in companies that are popular on internet platforms. Cryptocurrencies have experienced significant growth as high meme coins and tokens have increased in value. They are now an integral part of the crypto ecosystem, and have become part of the Bitcoin rally this year.

Today they are even more so. Of the major meme coins by market capitalization, Dogecoin – Elon Musk's favorite – is leading the charge: it's up nearly 6%, trading hands at $0.15, according to CoinGecko.

Meanwhile, other popular but smaller-cap tokens like Ethereum-based Pepe and Floki are both up more than 8 percent.

Edited by Andrew Hayward.