The "retail stock god" who once defeated Wall Street has returned, and the meme coin of the same name has skyrocketed 100 times in one day

This morning, a tweet went viral in both the U.S. stock trading and crypto communities, with over 6 million views in five hours. This tweet came from Roaring Kitty, a former U.S. stock trader. This was his first tweet in three years.

Although no one could tell what the content of the tweet represented, the entire trading community was excited about the name Roaring Kitty, and many people shouted "Roaring Kitty is back" on Twitter. Why does a tweet have such a big influence? Who is Roaring Kitty?

From a certain perspective, it can be said that Roaring Kitty gave birth to the meme section of the crypto community. The myth of "retail investors vs. Wall Street" led by Roaring Kitty made Robinhood popular, and then provided early liquidity to the meme ancestor DOGE.

Keith Gill, known as "Roaring Kitty", used to be a financial analyst. Roaring Kitty is the username he uses on YouTube and Twitter. He is also a loyal user of Reddit.

In September 2019, Gill bought the stock of GameStop GME, a long-established American gaming product retailer that had been losing money for many years, and showed his transaction screenshots on the Reddit r/wallstreetbets sub-forum - a long position of about $53,000. Since then, Gill has frequently posted positive views on GME on Reddit.

In addition to text output, he also posted videos and live broadcasts on Youtube to talk about the fundamentals and potential space of GME. For a long time, many retail traders were influenced by him to buy GME, and then went to the comment area of his Youtube channel to keep warm and firmly hold their confidence.

Roaring Kitty in Youtube channel

In 2020, GME did surge, and Gill's assets increased several times. But GME's upward trend has attracted the attention of Wall Street institutions, and capital is not optimistic about GME. In January 2021, Melvin Capital hedge fund and well-known short-selling institution Citron Research announced on Twitter that they were short GME, believing that its price should be halved from the closing price.

This news sparked anger among many retail investors. That month, the Reddit retail social forum group Wall Street Bets launched a large-scale short squeeze campaign on major social media, pushing the GME stock price from $17 at the beginning of the month to a high of $347, an increase of nearly 19 times. In this process, Roaring Kitty played an indispensable role. He said on Reddit that he would not sell even a penny of GME, and broadcast the GME stock price live on Youtube for 7 hours.

It is worth mentioning that GME once plummeted by nearly two-thirds due to the suspension of trading by brokers, and Roaring Kitty's earnings retreated by more than $15 million, but he still held firmly and continued to post updates in the community, and finally waited for GME to rise again.

The $53,000 GME that Roaring Kitty bought in 2019 turned into more than $30 million more than a year later, reaching a peak of $48 million. Roaring Kitty became famous overnight, and Netflix made a documentary called "Eating the Rich: The Legend of GameStop" based on this incident. The movie "Dumb Money" released last year was also based on Roaring Kitty, telling the story of his journey from the first purchase of GameStop stock to the peak of the stock and the collapse of the hedge fund.

Because a large number of retail investors were trading on Robinhood at the time, and Robinhood had suspended GME trading during this "long-short war", the intense emotions of investors on Robinhood overflowed to other targets, including DOGE, which had no substantive significance. Shortly after the GME incident, Elon Musk began to post a large number of tweets on Twitter to spread the Doge Meme. DOGE peaked three months later with a market value of $90 billion. The MEME bull market in the crypto community began at that time.

Looking back, although Roaring Kitty never bought cryptocurrencies, the rebellious culture he led and the "low threshold trading" role played by Robinhood in the whole incident just echoed the culture of the crypto community.

Chamath Palihapitiya, a venture capitalist who became famous on Wall Street for buying a large amount of Bitcoin at $80, commented on Roaing Kitty's "record" at the time and said that retail investors have a level that is not inferior to that of Wall Street professionals. In the past, they were unable to use more financial tools because of insufficient funds, so they were cut by institutions. Now retail investors are united to blast institutions, which shows that the era of retail investors has arrived.

As the battle against Wall Street gradually ended, the price of GME gradually fell, and Roaring Kitty disappeared from the Internet. His Youtube channel and Twitter were no longer updated, and the last update was in 2021.

After three years, Roaring Kitty tweeted again. This legendary figure who is a "light of retail investors" and has his own crypto culture naturally aroused the excitement of the community. Prior to this, GME had experienced a week of growth. With the help of Roaring Kitty, GME's weekly increase was as high as 80% at the time of writing. The last time it achieved such an increase was in 2022.

[BlockBeats updated on the evening of May 13: Affected by the tweet about the return of Roaring Kitty, GameStop’s US stocks were suspended due to volatility. After the resumption, the intraday increase reached 80%]

For the crypto community, the biggest beneficiaries of the return of the “retail stock god” are naturally the meme players.

In the comment area of Roaring Kitty, there are many comments about various meme coins. The luckiest one is KITTY, the meme of the same name as Roaring Kitty, which was born on Solana on March 31. It fell by more than 90% the day after it went online and was on the road to zero, but unexpectedly rose sharply because of the return of Roaring Kitty.

One month after it was zeroed, KITTY rose by more than 100 times in nearly 7 hours. Some traders also got lucky. A trader spent about $3,000 to buy 17.4 million KITTY yesterday before Roaring Kitty tweeted. Now he has made a profit of more than $100,000 because of this tweet.

Following KITTY on Solona, another keyword in Roaring Kitty's story, "GME", has also become the wealth code of the meme community. Several meme coins with the same name as GME have been launched or revived one after another. The GME meme coin on Solana was launched in February this year, and it has a daily increase of 815% three months after returning to zero. Among these tokens, the one with the highest increase is "GME" on Ethereum. Although it was launched at noon today, according to the news of Roaring Kitty's return, 5 hours have passed, and GME has gained more than 1000%.

Three years ago, Roaring Kitty created a wealth myth of "beating Wall Street" with the output of Youtube videos and Reddit communities; three years later, his "stage" moved to the encryption field, and a return tweet gave birth to meme tokens with an increase of more than ten times and a hundred times. The charm of "community power" lies in this.

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