Degens pumped GameStop memecoins because they're ‘bored’ – Traders

The price of unofficial GameStop memecoins have spiked alongside the rise of Gamestop’s (GME) share price due to a general sense of sluggishness in the market, say several crypto traders.

“People are bored and are taking any little sign of hope they can,” pseudonymous crypto trader Daan Crypto Trades told Cointelegraph.

“The excitement generated around GameStop memecoins demonstrates there’s capital out there that’s not being allocated,” Tyr Capital chief investment officer Ed Hindi told Cointelegraph.

The Solana-based memecoin GameStop (GME) — which has no affiliation to the official company — rose by 2,727% in the last two days, alongside Gamestop’s stock price experiencing a 204.50% increase during the same time frame, according to CoinMarketCap and Google Finance data.

GME has risen 65.68% over the past 24-hours alone. Source: CoinMarketCap

It came after well-known GameStop stock trader Keith Gill posted from his “Roaring Kitty” X account on May 12 for the first time in nearly three years. 

Gill went dark on social media on June 19, 2021, but returned after an extended hiatus, posting a typically cryptic meme of a gamer sitting up in their chair to announce his comeback.

Meanwhile, among the top 100 cryptocurrencies, PEPE (PEPE $0.000011) and Floki (FLOKI) were the only tokens to sustain significant gains during the same timeframe, rising by 35.73% and 11.27% respectively.

DOGE (DOGE $0.15) and Shiba Inu (SHIBA) experienced spikes on May 12 but have since retraced by 1.76% and 1.39% over the past 24 hours.

This signals that traders are chasing specific short-term narratives rather than having overall confidence in the entire market.

“Investors are overreacting to short-term trends like the GameStop event precisely because the market is quiet at the moment. We need a new narrative in the crypto markets,” Hindi declared.

Alongside this, the overall market sentiment has decreased over the past 30 days according to the Fear and Greed Index, falling by around 10 points to a "Greed" score of 64 as of May 15.

Daan believes that the GameStop price surge in the stock market reassured crypto traders that related memecoins in the crypto market would follow suit.

“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 explained, adding that the 2021 GameStop “saga is still on a lot of people's minds.”

“I don't think anything but price going up needs to happen. I am always of the belief that price precedes narrative. So projects can have great fundamentals but if price doesn't move people don't care,” they added.

On the contrary, Dynamo DeFi founder Patrick Scott believes “there’s no shortage of narratives” in the crypto market.

“Tokenized real-world assets have grown from being practically nonexistent to billions of dollars in the past few years,” he told Cointelegraph and pointed to the trends currently emerging on the Solana and DePIN network:

“Solana on-chain activity now rivals Ethereum, and Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks (DePIN) are bringing non-speculative revenue into crypto.”