Written by: Golem
JINQIAN collapses to zero in two hours; "crypto-stock pairing" becomes a custom "pig butchering" scam
On the evening of September 2, a dramatic scene unfolded on Robinhood Chain. The coin-stock paired meme coin JINQIAN surged to a market cap of $80 million within an hour of opening, then plummeted to $10 million within the next hour; as of press time, JINQIAN’s market cap had dwindled to approximately $3 million. Wealth freedom or total loss of principal—seems to hinge on a single thought.
Buy stocks and send memes? Crypto-themed pig butchering scams
To understand what happened in these two hours, we need to start with a post by overseas KOL Rune.
On September 1, Rune posted that he spent $1.8 million over-the-counter to acquire 37.4% of a Nasdaq-listed company with a market cap of $4.8 million, a share price of $0.12, and a short interest ratio of 92.3%. His plan is to tokenize the company’s shares and deploy them on Robinhood Chain, then issue a meme coin paired with the token. As the community trades the meme coin, demand will flow to the stock token, prompting the issuer to buy an equivalent amount of real shares, thereby creating a short squeeze in the stock market.
Just the idea alone triggered a euphoric reaction among countless Meme investors, as it perfectly aligned with the大众 fantasy of "retail traders taking down institutions," "crypto crushing Wall Street," and "a poor underdog rising to become a triumphant hero"—a classic wish-fulfillment narrative. The community was eagerly awaiting such a coin to emerge—and one day later, JINQIAN was born.
JINQIAN is paired with the stock token FAMI. Farmmi (FAMI), a Nasdaq-listed company primarily selling mushrooms, saw its stock price rise to a intraday high of $0.47 on U.S. markets, with a gain of over 300% in one hour, as the value of JINQIAN increased and the on-chain stock token FAMI rose in price.
I thought JINQIAN would be the next GameStop, but it turned out to be a pig butchering scam tailored for retail crypto traders.
Although the FAMI token name matches the stock ticker of Nasdaq-listed Farmmi, it is not an officially tokenized stock, and this asset is not listed on Robinhood’s official contract list. This means that when JINQIAN trading drives demand for FAMI, the issuer may not have purchased any Farmmi (FAMI) shares on the stock market at all—the short squeeze scenario Rune imagined has not occurred.
After JINQIAN's crash, the entity previously demanding community airdrops of Rune quickly posted a clarification, stating that all previously published tweets about acquiring U.S. public companies were AI-generated "slop posts" created by Claude and entirely fabricated.
All answers are correct, but all methods are wrong.
Rune’s clarification is clearly for self-preservation, as affected investors are already preparing to contact the FBI to have him arrested. For now, let’s refrain from evaluating Rune—what truly deserves consideration is this: if the demand for FAMI stock tokens triggered by JINQIAN did not translate to the real stock market, then who was responsible for driving up Farmmi’s (FAMI) stock price?
The answer remains the crypto meme community—“smart” crypto players acted ahead of high-frequency traders and Wall Street elites, buying Farmmi (FAMI) shares before they were forced to, and since Farmmi (FAMI) is a small-cap stock, retail buying was enough to send it soaring over 300%.
The Chinese-speaking KOL 0xSun later posted an analysis stating that, under normal circumstances, the logic behind an on-chain stock short squeeze is that retail investors who do not hold stock tokens buy Meme coins, driving up the price of the stock tokens that serve as the underlying assets of the liquidity pool; market makers, seeing arbitrage opportunities, buy the underlying stocks and convert and mint them into on-chain tokenized stocks, re-anchoring the price; the market makers’ purchases of the underlying stocks then push up the stock price, triggering a short squeeze.
However, this is not the case with JINQIAN/FAMI: non-compliant project teams have issued the FAMI token on-chain while retaining minting rights, and the liquidity pool may not be locked; FAMI is essentially just an on-chain token bearing the same name as Farmmi (FAMI). Due to the extremely low market capitalization of the actual FAMI company, on-chain sentiment has been triggered, causing retail investors to wildly buy JINQIAN, driving up the price of FAMI, which serves as the base pool. Some retail investors went further, directly purchasing Farmmi (FAMI), which led to the stock price increase.
Therefore, the rise in Farmmi (FAMI) stock price is a classic case of getting the outcome right but the process entirely wrong.
Is the meme short squeeze in coin-stock pairs a false premise?
Language can describe reality, or it can shape it. Is the narrative of “Meme coins shorting Wall Street” truly valid, or is the Meme community just looking for nails with a hammer?
Aside from pure scam projects like JINQIAN, recent months have seen other meme coins paired with stock tokens promoting the narrative of “meme coins shorting Wall Street,” with BONER being the most prominent example, currently boasting a market cap of $44 million. BONER is paired with the stock token HIMS, representing Hims (HIMS), a company primarily selling erectile dysfunction medications. Chinese-speaking meme KOL Wang Xiao'er has been actively promoting BONER, claiming its ultimate purpose is to make the idea of memes driving stock prices upward a reality and to challenge Wall Street.
Using meme coins to inflate their underlying stock tokens is essentially an indirect and inefficient form of market manipulation: the so-called "flywheel effect" is merely a tactic by market makers or project teams to channel retail investors' speculative impulses into the underlying stock market, creating short-term price discrepancies. However, this emotion-driven buying lacks fundamental support and is highly fragile; even if the token temporarily trades at a significant premium to the underlying stock, it will quickly revert to aligning with the stock price due to arbitrage and value restoration mechanisms.
The issuer of stock tokens on Robinhood Chain is solely Robinhood itself, and only authorized participants (APs) can directly subscribe to or redeem stock tokens from Robinhood. When an AP subscribes to stock tokens from Robinhood, the subscription funds are not transmitted in real time to the underlying stock market; this process is subject not only to U.S. market trading hours but also to compliance, settlement, and custodial procedures.
Therefore, the logic that this so-called Meme coin trading demand stimulates market makers or issuers to buy stocks faces its first reality: on-chain Meme sentiment FOMO ends within hours, while fund transmission has yet to begin.
Of course, whether the logic behind "Meme coins shorting Wall Street" holds up in reality may not matter to Meme traders—Wang Xiao'er has already realized over $800,000 in profits on BONER.
The fastest way to unite people in this world is to establish a common enemy, even if it’s merely a hypothetical one. For retail investors, Wall Street and institutions have always been that “enemy”—it’s always exciting to make money from them or force them to do something.
But when paying for the "grand narrative," don't forget you're in the meme trenches, where there are no brothers—only demons you pour onto each other.
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