Trading tied to FAMI and JINQIAN exploded on Robinhood chain on Sept. 2. A token called JINQIAN cleared a $70 million market cap within one hour, while another on-chain token using the name FAMI climbed alongside it and at one point moved past $100 million.
The trade quickly spilled into U.S. equities. The stock at the center of the story was Farmmi, the Nasdaq-listed mushroom business that trades under the ticker FAMI. Its annual report does mention a mushroom variety called Jinqian mushroom, which helped connect the ticker, the token name, and the meme framing. During the session, Farmmi shares jumped more than 300%, briefly traded near $0.4, and saw volume swell into the hundreds of millions of shares. For a micro-cap company that had been trading around $0.12 only days earlier and carried a market value of a little over $4 million, the move stood out sharply.
The setup started with Rune’s post on Aug. 31
The story traces back two days earlier. On Aug. 31, crypto trader Rune (@RuneCrypto_) posted that he had spent about $1.8 million in an over-the-counter deal to buy 37.4% of a low-market-cap Nasdaq company. He gave a precise set of numbers: roughly $4.8 million in market value, a share price near $0.12, and short interest at 92.3%. In his telling, nearly the entire float had been borrowed and sold short.
He also laid out the next step. The plan was to tokenize the stock on Robinhood Chain, launch a paired meme coin, use on-chain capital to buy the underlying shares, and force short sellers to cover at higher prices.
That pitch spread fast because the short-squeeze angle is one of the strongest retail narratives tied to Robinhood. On Jan. 28, 2021, GameStop touched $483 intraday after sitting near $18 a month earlier. Retail traders on Reddit bought heavily into a traditional video-game retailer and turned it into a nightmare for short sellers, whose borrowed shares had at one point exceeded 100% of the float. Keith Gill, better known as Roaring Kitty, became the face of that run after showing a position that went from $53,000 to $48 million and saying, 「I like the stock.」
Once Rune’s thread was out, the market focused on one question: which stock fit the numbers? The community eventually found that no Nasdaq stock cleanly matched the full set of figures he gave. By then, though, the mood had already shifted.
FAMI and JINQIAN became the outlet for the trade
By Sept. 2, the crowd had settled on FAMI and JINQIAN. Farmmi checked several boxes at once: a Nasdaq ticker, a tiny valuation, an edible mushroom business, and the Jinqian mushroom reference in company filings. Those pieces were enough to build a ready-made U.S.-stock meme trade.
On-chain activity accelerated first. The token named FAMI rose 10x in an hour, and trading volume moved past $100 million. Traders poured into the JINQIAN/FAMI pool to add liquidity. The source notes that even a 4% fee did not slow participation, and slippage was largely ignored.
The underlying equity also moved hard. Nasdaq-listed FAMI rose more than 300% intraday and traded between $0.39 and $0.47 at one point, with volume in the hundreds of millions of shares. At the same time, the on-chain FAMI token reached a market cap close to $100 million, roughly 10 to 20 times the entire equity value of the company behind the ticker. A stock that usually drew little attention suddenly posted a single day of trading that rivaled years of prior activity.
Rune said he did not launch the token
As the move heated up, Rune responded publicly. He said the token launch was not his.
According to the source, Rune said the statements about buying 37.4% of the company and planning to tokenize the stock for a squeeze had in fact been written with Claude and then posted by him. But the person who actually issued tokens on-chain and created the liquidity pools was someone else who borrowed the idea.
After the first rush faded, market participants turned to wallet activity and contract records to check whether the narrative matched what had happened on-chain.
Contract data pointed to a deliberate imitation
The on-chain FAMI contract, according to the source, was deployed at 21:34 UTC on Sept. 1. It was a newly minted token.
Total supply was set at 37,430,000. Farmmi’s equity count, as cited in the article, was also framed around roughly 37.43 million shares. The first move by the deployer was not a market buy. It was a mint from the zero address to the deployer’s own wallet for 14,223,400 tokens.
That works out to about 38.0% of total supply, using the calculation shown in the source: 14,223,400 ÷ 37,430,000 ≈ 38.0%. The number sits very close to the 37.4% stake Rune had cited. In other words, even the reserved allocation appeared designed to echo his claim. The point, according to the report, was to make traders believe the token was part of Rune’s plan.
The main break in the story was Robinhood’s own rule set
The bigger issue was not only whether Rune launched the token. It was whether the on-chain FAMI token could qualify as a Robinhood stock token at all.
Robinhood’s documentation says the platform recognizes only official contract addresses for stock tokens. A token with the same name or ticker but a different contract address does not count as a Robinhood stock token. The official versions can be minted only through designated authorized participants via Robinhood Assets (Jersey), with custodial shares behind them. A community-issued token with the same ticker does not meet that standard.
That distinction matters because the FAMI share available inside Robinhood’s stock-trading app and the token called FAMI on-chain are not the same asset. One is an equity offered through brokerage rails. The other, based on the source material, was simply a same-name token.
The article adds that Robinhood’s official asset list includes more than 100 tickers, among them CRM, JNJ, LLY, and QCOM. FAMI is not on that list, and neither is Farmmi. That means there is no official Farmmi stock token on Robinhood chain. The token that surged on Sept. 2 was a newly created same-name coin deployed on Sept. 1, not a tokenized version of the listed stock.
The short-squeeze path failed at the token layer
That missing piece breaks the logic behind the entire trade. The transmission path described in the narrative — on-chain money buying the meme asset, demand feeding into a tokenized stock, and the issuer then buying listed shares on Nasdaq to squeeze shorts — works only if the stock already has an official stock token on Robinhood’s list. The tokenized stock must exist as a recognized on-chain asset so it can be priced, paired in liquidity pools, and tied back to actual custodial shares.
FAMI was not on that list. There was no official FAMI stock token on-chain. The token that jumped 10x had no official backing from the stock itself.
The narrative was powerful: a heavily shorted micro-cap, an on-chain retail loop, and the prospect of a squeeze. Those are the exact elements that can light up Robinhood traders. This time, though, the market got a ticker-matching token and a strong story before it got the one thing the trade required — an actual official stock token.