Memecoin shenanigans spill into Nasdaq as microcap mushroom seller Farmmi surges 350%

Farmmi shares surged as much as 350% on Wednesday after traders piled into a memecoin paired with an onchain version of the small-cap Nasdaq stock on Robinhood Chain.

The Chinese agricultural products company, which specializes in selling edible dried mushrooms, briefly traded at $0.50 per share after closing Tuesday at around $0.12. The stock quickly corrected back to roughly $0.18 while the stock saw more than 720 million shares traded — nearly 90 times more than its daily average.

The spike coincided with activity around JINQIAN, a Robinhood Chain memecoin paired against an onchain token using Farmmi’s FAMI ticker.

At its peak, the memecoin's implied valuation of $60 million was roughly 10 times higher than that of the publicly traded company itself, according to DexScreener data.

Pairing memecoin with tokenized stocks has become a trend on Robinhood Chain, allowing the tokens to trade against equities rather than assets like stablecoins, bitcoin or ether. Some popular examples of this include Artificial Inu (AI) paired with tokenized Nvidia (NVDA) shares and Memory Cow Moo (MOO) paired with Micron (MU).

But those pairings have been against large-cap companies with deep liquidity. Farmmi, on the other hand, employs only 15 people and could be considered a nano-cap, with a market cap of just a few million dollars before Wednesday's rally.

It is worth noting that the FAMI token is not one of Robinhood's official stock tokens and appears to have been independently issued. That means there would be no mint-and-redemption mechanism for the token to generate purchases of Farmmi's Nasdaq-listed shares, as would be the case for the aforementioned pairs tied to Nvidia or Micron.

Instead, it's likely that speculative traders picked up on the mania around FAMI and bought into the actual stock through a brokerage.