TL;DR
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The price of ‘stuff’ (like bananas) is going up, making our money worth less — safe assets returning 5-10% per year can’t outpace this devaluation, so investors are buying higher risk assets (like memecoins).
Full Story
The price of bananas is driving up memecoin prices.
Hear us out…
Inflation on the price of ‘stuff’ (e.g. groceries — including, but not limited to: bananas) continues to be stubborn, which means our money doesn’t go as far anymore.
This loss in monetary value incentivizes investors to go further out on the risk curve, because safe assets that return a tidy 5-10% per year can no longer outpace the silent monetary devaluation we’re experiencing.
So when there’s a hot new stock or cryptocurrency, more people are likely to pile into it, looking for a quick win.
Yesterday, that pattern of behavior played out in GameStop’s stock price.
(Again).
This time, the catalyst was a Reddit post from Keith Gill (@TheRoaringKitty on X/Twitter, and @deepf***ingvalue on Reddit), that showed his MASSIVE new position in $GME.
His trade? $200M worth of options that will allow him to buy $GME stock at $20 per share by June 21.
(I.e. Keith is wagering that GME will be worth more than $20 per share by the end of the month, and these options mean he’ll be able to buy in at a discount).
…cool, what does this have to do with crypto?
Well, this trade has gotten a lot of attention — so much so that it damn near doubled the $GME stock price in the span of an hour.
As traders look for similar opportunities, they pose the following question:
Q: “I missed the $GME pump, where’s the next opportunity?”
A: “There’s a good chance it’s going to be found in a memecoin.”
Is this a guarantee? No.
Is this a symptom of a healthy market? Also no.
But the mania of frothy financial markets often leads to massive price appreciation across high-risk asset classes.
And crypto is one of those asset classes.