This Week on Crypto Twitter: Roaring Kitty Chases Dogs, Blast Airdrop Underwhelms – Decrypt

Meme stock influencer Keith Gill, aka Roaring Kitty, flexed his enduring influence over odd corners of the stock market this week, as the much-hyped airdrop for Ethereum layer-2 network Blast appeared to fall flat. 

After a prolonged period of silence, GameStop bull Roaring Kitty abruptly returned to Twitter on Thursday with an enigmatic, wordless post of a cartoon dog. 

Within a span of 15 minutes, the (forgive us) dog whistle sent major pet care stocks surging. Chewy, Inc. instantly soared 33%, Petco pumped 14%, and PetMed Express saw a 7% bump. 

Those jumps collectively created several billions of dollars worth of value within minutes. Just as quickly, however, the gains were erased. 

As is increasingly common with such phenomena, a Solana meme coin also by the name of the CHEWY surged some 11,000% on the news cycle. Curiously, some traders appear to have bought up the token before Roaring Kitty made his canine-themed post.  

Similarly opportune trades appear to have been made on CHEWY’s stock earlier this week. 

Meanwhile, in the cryptoverse proper, this week saw the long-awaited launch of Blast’s native token, via a free airdrop of some 17 billion newly minted BLAST tokens.

Many expected the event to be the free money event of the summer. And while it was certainly nothing to scoff at—early trading prices pegged the airdrop at a collective value of $354 million—many Blast users were sorely disappointed with those figures. 

The disappointment likely stemmed from previous, sky-high expectations for the token, which were based on the Blast network’s popularity among crypto whales and the exorbitant sums collected during the airdrop for Blast’s predecessor Blur—the disruptive, incentivized NFT marketplace.

As soon as BLAST debuted on Wednesday morning, the token experienced a massive sell-off, which only served to plunge its price further. That’s common for airdrops—but again, the massive expectations amplified the initial malaise.

Some Blast ecosystem stakeholders, however—such as savvy Fantasy Top player Jenndefer—pushed back on the narrative that the Blast airdrop failed. 

Jenndefer emphasized, within hours of BLAST’s lackluster debut, that while many Blast users had dumped the new token, many whales in the ecosystem remained committed to it. 

BLAST’s price briefly rebounded on Thursday, before falling again. It’s currently hovering around $0.02, far below early expectations.

Edited by Andrew Hayward