Unofficial token triggers 350% surge in Nasdaq-listed Farmmi

Written by Xiao Bing

On September 2, Farmmi (FAMI), a Nasdaq-listed company, surged intraday from $0.12 to $0.50, a gain of approximately 350%. Trading volume reached 720 million shares, nearly 90 times its daily average. This tiny agricultural company, headquartered in China, specializing in the sale of dried edible mushrooms and employing only 15 full-time staff, suddenly became one of the most volatile stocks on the U.S. market that day.

The stock price then quickly dropped back to around $0.18, completing a sharp surge and collapse within a few hours.

The catalyst came from Robinhood Chain. A meme coin named JINQIAN formed a trading pair with an on-chain asset using the code "FAMI." According to GMGN data, JINQIAN reached an implied valuation of approximately $60 million at its peak—about 10 times Farmmi’s market capitalization at the time.

But there is a fact that has been severely overlooked during the spread of this event: the FAMI tokens on the blockchain are not official stock tokens issued by Robinhood.

On Robinhood Chain, Artificial Inu (AI) is paired with tokenized NVDA, and Memory Cow Moo (MOO) is paired with tokenized MU. These "stock-paired meme coins" operate under the assumption that the stock tokens are officially issued by Robinhood and are backed by a 1:1 reserve of actual U.S. stocks. When on-chain trading increases demand for the stock tokens, the issuer must purchase an equivalent amount of real stocks to mint new tokens, creating a传导 of buying pressure from the blockchain to the U.S. stock market.

The FAMI token in the JINQIAN/FAMI trading pair does not have this mechanism. It is an independently issued on-chain asset that borrows the stock ticker of Farmmi, but it has no minting/redemption channel, no real stock collateral, and no arbitrage relationship with Nasdaq.

On-chain analyst riley_gmi confirmed on X that the on-chain FAMI is not on Robinhood's official stock token list.

The logic behind the official stock pairing for meme coins is: on-chain demand → mint tokens → purchase real shares → generate genuine buying pressure.

The logic behind JINQIAN/FAMI is completely different: on-chain hype → social media spread → traders assume there’s a stock mapping → influx of retail investors into actual stocks via brokers → stock price surge reinforces the meme narrative.

There is no mechanical transmission; the only mediums of transmission are human attention and misunderstanding.

Farmmi was not chosen by accident.

Its stock price is $0.12, with a market cap of only a few million dollars. Such a tiny stock has extremely low trading volume and shallow liquidity. When hundreds or even thousands of traders suddenly flood in, the price can be easily pushed up by 350%. In contrast, NVDA in the AI/NVDA pair is a company with a $5 trillion market cap; even if there are $3.3 million worth of tokenized NVIDIA tokens in the on-chain pool, they have zero impact on the actual stock price.

The code "FAMI" itself also has exploitative value. It uses the same visual language as the official stock tokens on Robinhood Chain—the code, trading pairs, and K-line charts on GMGN—making it difficult for ordinary traders to immediately distinguish between the official token and the imitation.

When JINQIAN was trading at a $60 million valuation, Farmmi’s actual market cap was approximately $6 million. An implied valuation of a on-chain asset reaching ten times that of its underlying reference—especially when that reference is a mushroom company with no connection to memes—was itself the most potent social media content imaginable.

Over the past two years, the direction of price transmission between the crypto market and U.S. equities has been clear: U.S. stock prices determine the prices of tokenized stocks. When Tesla’s earnings beat expectations, the tokenized TSLA followed suit. When NVIDIA’s stock hit a new high, the on-chain NVDA rose in tandem. Information and pricing flowed from traditional markets to the blockchain.

The FAMI incident first clearly demonstrated the possibility of reverse传导: on-chain activity influenced real stock prices.

This reverse传导 does not require any formal minting/redemption mechanism. It only requires three conditions:

A sufficiently small stock (with extremely low daily trading volume), a sufficiently loud on-chain narrative (a meme coin with a $60 million valuation), and a sufficiently vague visual association (identical code).

When these three elements are combined, traders can transcend the boundaries between on-chain and off-chain, turning false token relationships into genuine stock buy orders.

This serves as a footnote to Rune’s (@RuneCrypto_) claim that he intended to acquire Nasdaq micro-cap stocks and engineer a short squeeze using meme coins: while Rune’s idea was still in the conceptual phase, the FAMI event has already provided a naturally occurring prototype. The difference lies in the fact that Rune sought to establish formal minting/redemption channels to generate genuine buying pressure, whereas the FAMI event demonstrated that even formal channels are unnecessary—code similarity combined with social propagation is sufficient.

What happens next?

The FAMI incident exposed a structural vulnerability: anyone can create a token on Robinhood Chain using any publicly traded company's ticker symbol, pair it with a meme coin, and wait for social media virality to spill over into the real stock market.

This introduces a new risk factor for thousands of Nasdaq and OTC micro-cap stocks. For the SEC, this exists in a regulatory gray area: FAMI tokens on the blockchain are not securities, and the act of creating trading pairs may not be illegal in itself, but the resulting price volatility in U.S. equities has already constituted a de facto market disruption.

Farmmi closed the day at approximately $0.18, down 64% from its intraday high of $0.50. It is impossible to determine how many traders were aware that the on-chain FAMI is not the official stock token.

This company selling dried mushrooms has likely never heard of JINQIAN. But starting today, every Nasdaq micro-cap company’s IR department may need to ask a new question: Has anyone used our code to launch a meme coin on-chain?