As GameStop GME stocks surged from $19.79 to a high of $380, in the past week, Hedge fund Melvin Capital and Citron Research lost billions due to the WSB short squeeze. However, this week has been about the Reddit community of day traders, WallStreetBets or WSB that undoubtedly, for better or for worse, made its mark on financial markets.
Nevertheless, some crypto companies have decided to pay ‘tribute’ to the WallStreetBets community. Recently, Coinmarketcap decided to list WallStreetBets token, which currently outranks Bitcoin, as the biggest crypto by market cap. CoinMarketCap stressed the fact that the listing was “a joke- no such asset exists.”
The price of the “joke” token is $483, and its market cap is $24.8 billion. There are apparently 51 million WSB tokens in supply, with a daily trading volume of over $100 million.
In response to the WSB GameStop short, brokers such as popular trading app Robinhood stopped trading activity for GameStop, as they believed the markets were being manipulated. A majority of the WSB Reddit members use Robinhood for trading.
Soon enough, several crypto enthusiasts took to Twitter to call out the trading app’s decision. Dave Portnoy, President of Barstool Sports went as far as saying that he would “burn Robinhood to the ground if they shut down free market trading.”
At the same time, US politician Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said that Robinhood’s decision was “unacceptable.” AOC stated:
We now need to know more about Robinhood’s decision to block retail investors from purchasing stock while hedge funds are freely able to trade the stock as they see fit.
Others had another perspective about the recent events. Ethhub co-founder Eric Conner said DeFi would gain more popularity:
We are getting the best DeFi ads for free.
— eric.eth (@econoar) January 28, 2021
Many believed the move would only work in favor of Bitcoin. Paolo Ardoino, CTO of Bitfinex said in a release shared with AMBCrypto that the asset rising on a “day of such anger against financial elites” represented “hope for a fairer and more equitable financial system.” Bitcoin has surged by roughly 18% in the last 24 hours and was trading at $37,535, at press time.
Meanwhile, FTX derivatives exchange launched futures trading for “a basket of Wall Street Bets markets.” The index quarterly futures contract includes stocks being targeted by WSB members. Namely, Nokia, GameStop, as well as dogecoin among others.
