Author: @Mrjacknicee
On September 2nd, on the Robinhood chain, a token called JINQIAN CA:0xe81880c1c5054245e036359f5c7be31606e79f56 saw its market cap surpass $70 million in just one hour.
JINQIAN, the Chinese pinyin for "money," was riding on the coattails of the NASDAQ-listed company Farmmi, which grows shiitake mushrooms. In Farmmi's annual report, there really was a record of a shiitake mushroom variety called Jinqian mushroom, which the community nicknamed the "money mushroom."
Meanwhile, Farmmi's main stock on NASDAQ, ticker FAMI, skyrocketed over 300% during the session, briefly touching around $0.4, with trading volume exploding to hundreds of millions of shares. A micro-cap company that was languishing around $0.12 a few days prior, with a market cap of just over $4 million, suddenly became the brightest star on the board.
On-chain, a token called "FAMI" also rose alongside JINQIAN, simultaneously pumping, its market cap once exceeding $100 million.
The story begins two days earlier.
A Good Narrative
On August 31st, crypto trader Rune (@RuneCrypto_) tweeted: He spent about $1.8 million to purchase 37.4% of the shares of a low-market-cap NASDAQ company over-the-counter (OTC). The numbers he provided were very specific: a market cap of about $4.8 million, a share price of about $0.12, and a short interest of 92.3%. This stock had nearly its entire float sold short.
He didn't hide his next plan either: tokenize this stock on the Robinhood Chain, then issue a paired meme coin, and use the on-chain funds to buy the actual stock to engineer a short squeeze. A short squeeze forces those who borrowed shares to short to buy them back at high prices to cover their positions.
This was, at first glance, a good story. Short squeezing is a narrative etched into Robinhood's bones.
On January 28, 2021, GameStop touched $483 intraday. A month before, it was at $18. Retail investors on Reddit bought a physical game disc seller into Wall Street's nightmare: short interest once exceeded 100% of the float. Shorts were waiting for it to go bankrupt, but ended up bleeding money. The leader was Keith Gill, known online as Roaring Kitty, who publicly tracked his position growing from $53,000 to $48 million, saying into the camera: "I like the stock."
Therefore, once Rune's story emerged, the only question was which company he had targeted. Because the community discovered that no NASDAQ stock simultaneously matched all the specific numbers he had disclosed.
But when emotions run high, details often get overlooked.
On September 2nd, when the community discovered the strange FAMI and JINQIAN tokens, they quickly connected the dots: Farmmi, NASDAQ ticker FAMI, a company in the edible mushroom business, with a product called JINQIAN mushroom, extremely small market cap. All the elements of a US meme stock were there. Let's go. (For the logic behind US meme stocks, see "The Logic of US Meme Stocks: Moving the Short Squeeze On-Chain, from BONER")
Emotions quickly soared.
The on-chain FAMI token surged 10x in an hour. Trading volume rapidly broke through $100 million. People rushed into the JINQIAN/FAMI liquidity pool: 4% transaction fee? Let's go. Slippage? Doesn't matter.
The actual stock wasn't idle either. NASDAQ-listed FAMI rose over 300% intraday, briefly touching $0.39–0.47, with trading volume expanding to hundreds of millions of shares. The on-chain FAMI token's market cap peaked near $100 million, nearly ten to twenty times the market cap of the actual company. A usually ignored mushroom company saw a single day's trading volume that could match its total volume from the past several years.
Why It Might Be a Scam
Amid the frenzy, Rune responded.
He said it wasn't him. That announcement about the acquisition—"I bought 37.4%," "I'm preparing to tokenize and squeeze"—was written and posted by Claude at his request. The person who actually issued the tokens on-chain and created the liquidity pool was someone else who borrowed his idea.
After the emotions subsided, someone checked the on-chain address of the token deployer. The truth was far more precise than the story.
The on-chain FAMI token contract was deployed on September 1st at 21:34 (UTC). It was a brand-new token minted just the previous afternoon.
Total token supply: 37,430,000 tokens. And Farmmi's actual stock also has a share count of approximately 37.43 million shares. The numbers align perfectly.
The deployer's first action wasn't a purchase, but a mint: transferring 14,223,400 tokens from the zero address to themselves. Do the division:
14,223,400 ÷ 37,430,000 ≈ 38.0%, very close to the 37.4% Rune mentioned.
Even the proportion of reserved tokens was performed according to the script. The token creator's goal was to make everyone believe: Rune is behind this.
But more important than truth or falsehood is another thing: This play was missing a crucial building block from the very beginning.
Robinhood has a hard requirement for its stock tokens, clearly stated in the official documentation: Only the official contract address is recognized. The same name, the same ticker, but a different contract address? Then it's not a Robinhood stock token. On-chain stock tokens can only be minted and issued by designated authorized participants to Robinhood Assets (Jersey), backed by corresponding custodial stock holdings. A community-issued token with the same name doesn't count. The ability to buy and sell FAMI stock in the stock trading app is part of the brokerage business page, a completely separate matter from on-chain stock tokens.
The official asset list includes over a hundred tickers: CRM, JNJ, LLY, QCOM... but FAMI, or Farmmi, is not on it.
This means there is no FAMI stock token on the Robinhood chain. The FAMI that skyrocketed was just a token with the same name, with no relation whatsoever to the stock. It was minted on September 1st.
What does this imply? The real US meme stock play, where the stock token serves as the other side of the liquidity pool, gets locked, and gets priced, requires that the stock first be on the official list and have an official stock token. FAMI simply isn't on the list. There never was a "FAMI stock token" on-chain. The FAMI that rose 10x today is just a token borrowing the ticker, with nothing backing it.
That transmission chain—on-chain funds buy meme coin → demand for tokenized stock → issuer buys actual stock on NASDAQ to engineer a short squeeze—only works when "that stock actually has an official stock token." FAMI isn't on the list.
The narrative was a good narrative. A heavily shorted small-cap stock, on-chain联动, a short squeeze—every word hits the nerves of the Robinhood retail crowd.
Unfortunately, the best narratives are often the ones that attract the wolves. Can retail investors really never win?
