Keith Gill's Return Sends GameStop Soaring Again, Torching $1 Billion in Short Bets

Keith Gill, the trader better known online as Roaring Kitty who helped spark the original 2021 meme-stock craze, resurfaced after roughly three years out of the public eye and set off a fresh explosion in GameStop's share price.

On Sunday, Gill posted an image on X showing a figure leaning forward in a gaming chair — widely interpreted as a signal that he was back. That alone was enough to reignite speculative mania: GME surged more than 119% on Monday, breaking above $25 a share and adding an estimated $6 billion in market capitalization since late April.

The buying was intense enough that GME trading was halted nine times in a window of just over ninety minutes on Monday morning — circuit breakers some read as an attempt to slow the frenzy, echoing the trading pauses seen during the original 2021 episode. At its peak, the rally briefly pushed GameStop's valuation to roughly $10 billion, placing it among the 600 largest publicly traded US companies.

The renewed enthusiasm wasn't confined to GameStop: shares of AMC and Reddit also climbed on Monday as the broader meme-stock trade came back to life.

Given the clear parallels to 2021, many expect this renewed retail enthusiasm to eventually spill over into crypto markets — a venue that, unlike traditional exchanges, never closes and where market makers have no circuit breaker to pull when retail traders start winning.

01How the Original Saga Unfolded

The first act played out in 2021, when retail traders organized on WallStreetBets used commission-free apps like Robinhood to pile into GameStop, turning the stock into a symbol of defiance against institutional finance. Hedge funds that had bet heavily against the company were slow to close their short positions and ended up absorbing more than $5 billion in combined losses as the buying frenzy squeezed them — a windfall for the retail traders on the other side of the trade, and one framed at the time as a broader uprising against concentrated financial power.

GameStop's stock climbed over 1,000% during that run, while AMC gained roughly 2,300%, driven by easy mobile trading access and social-media coordination among retail traders who had rarely moved markets before. CNBC's Jim Cramer called it the "squeeze of a lifetime."

The institutional response was swift: Robinhood restricted buying in GameStop and several other targeted tickers, a move critics across the political spectrum branded an anti-democratic "capital control." Accusations followed that the system was rigged from the start, given hedge funds' ties to the market-making operations effectively running the exchange plumbing.

The fallout proved lasting. Robinhood was hit with a wave of lawsuits and federal scrutiny over the restrictions, and was ultimately fined a record $70 million by FINRA for trading outages that occurred during periods of high volatility and cost investors money. The saga later became the basis for the film Dumb Money.

02A Sequel Nobody Expected

The flames had largely died down over the following years, until Roaring Kitty's re-emergence in 2024 reignited the same energy almost overnight. GameStop shares climbed over 100% as repeated trading halts failed to fully contain the buying, and short sellers reportedly lost a combined $1 billion as the stock rallied.

Divisive online figures joined the moment: Andrew Tate framed GME buying as a stand against the system and even offered to purchase shares on behalf of followers.

The mania didn't stay confined to equities for long. It quickly bled into crypto markets, which had already been riding months of meme-driven volatility. A GameStop-themed token on Solana jumped more than 1,800% on Monday, while established meme coins PEPE, dogecoin, and shiba inu also rose. None of them matched a separate "Roaring Kitty" token on Solana, which spiked more than 15,000%.

03Looking for a Repeat of 2021's Aftermath

The original meme-stock episode was followed by an extraordinary year across crypto: bitcoin, ether, and numerous altcoins hit all-time highs, NFTs became a cultural phenomenon, total value locked in DeFi grew roughly 7.5x from about $20 billion to $150 billion, and the aggregate crypto market cap briefly topped $3 trillion. Whether 2024's meme-stock resurgence will spark a similar cycle in crypto is an open question, though retail appetite for risk already appears to be building.

Separately, the New York Stock Exchange has been polling market participants on round-the-clock trading, as regulators consider an application for what would be the first 24/7 stock exchange. Given the renewed frenzy around meme stocks, any serious push toward always-on equities trading is likely to face resistance from traditional-market participants unhappy about losing their downtime.

Crypto markets, by contrast, already offer the uninterrupted, globally accessible trading that traditional finance is only beginning to debate. Whether retail investors gravitate back toward a market where exchanges can freeze trading at will, or toward one that never stops, remains the open question as this cycle plays out.