The developer of a brand new Solana-based memecoin cashed out about $729,000 after Keith Gill’s Roaring Kitty X account posted the token’s ticker and contract deal with, triggering a short-lived buying and selling frenzy earlier than the publish was deleted.
Following the now-deleted X publish from Gill’s account, Purple Kitten Crew (RKC) briefly surged to an $11 million market capitalization earlier than falling about 67% to $3.6 million on the time of writing, in accordance to Dexscreener.
The token’s developer offered about $611,000 price of RKC and picked up one other $118,000 in creator charges by means of Pump.enjoyable, bringing the whole exit to roughly $729,000, in accordance to blockchain analytics firm Lookonchain. Lookonchain mentioned the developer initially used 10 wallets to purchase 395.18 million RKC, representing 39.52% of the token’s provide, elevating considerations that the launch was dominated by creator-linked wallets earlier than retail merchants entered.
The X publish marked Gill’s first exercise in over 15 months and raised group considerations over a compromised account. The token’s genesis distribution suggests a coordinated sniping effort the place the creator-linked wallets have front-run the group to extract worth.
The episode highlights the dangers round celebrity-linked memecoin launches, the place a single social media publish, or a suspected account compromise, can ship thinly traded tokens sharply greater earlier than concentrated early holders promote into later consumers.
Cointelegraph reached out to Gill to seek out out whether or not he nonetheless controls his X account.
RNC token deployer’s gross sales. Supply: Lookonchain
Gill was a retail dealer and former monetary analyst who was broadly credited for sparking the 2021 GameStop brief squeeze by means of viral social posts, encouraging retail merchants to purchase vital quantities of GameStop (GME) inventory, forcing brief sellers comparable to Citron Analysis to wind down their positions at a loss.
Now-deleted X publish on RNK token. Supply: The Roaring Kitty
Memecoin dealer loses almost $190K in 1 hour
Underscoring the perils of buying and selling newly-launched memecoins with a extremely concentrated provide, a cryptocurrency dealer misplaced almost $190,000 inside an hour on the RKC memecoin.
Dealer loses almost $190k on RKC memecoin. Lookonchain
The unlucky dealer spent $250,000 to purchase 31.15 million RKC tokens, simply earlier than Gill’s X publish was deleted, resulting in the dealer taking a $188,600 loss, after promoting his cash for simply $62,200, in accordance to Lookonchain.
Associated: Kaiko flags attainable front-running earlier than Robinhood token listings
Sniping and comparable coordinated exercise have been a long-standing value-extraction difficulty for memecoins.
On Wednesday, blockchain visualization platform Bubblemaps warned that 90 newly funded wallets purchased 90% of Thriller (MYSTERY) memecoin provide at launch, describing the token’s focus as a “textbook rip-off.”
The Thriller token has since crashed by over 98%, erasing most of its peak $7.5 million market capitalization, Dexscreener knowledge reveals.
Thriller/USD, all-time chart. Supply: Dexscreener
In February 2025, a cryptocurrency sniper made almost $28 million on the Broccoli (BROCCOLI) memecoin, shortly after Binance co-founder and former CEO, Zhangpeng Zhao, revealed that his Belgian Malinois was named “Broccoli,” sparking a wave of community-driven memecoin listings on launchpad Pump.enjoyable.
