How FAMI and JINQIAN Expose the Meme Stock Harvest

Tokens named JINQIAN and FAMI appeared on the Robinhood chain, with market caps surging in a short time, suspected to be linked to the US stock Farmmi. Trader Rune claimed to have acquired Farmmi shares and planned to tokenize them for a short squeeze, but later denied the operation. On-chain data revealed that the total token supply and reserved ratio matched Rune's statement, suggesting it was someone else's copycat. Robinhood's official list does not include FAMI, and the token has no actual connection to the underlying stock, so the narrative may not hold.

Author: @Mrjacknicee

On September 2, on the Robinhood chain, a token called Jinqian CA:0xe81880c1c5054245e036359f5c7be31606e79f56 saw its market cap break through $70 million in just one hour.

Jinqian, the Chinese pinyin for "jīnqián" (money), is linked to the Nasdaq-listed company Farmmi, which grows mushrooms. Farmmi's annual report actually recorded a mushroom variety called Jinqian mushroom, which the community calls "money mushroom."

Meanwhile, Farmmi's stock on Nasdaq, ticker FAMI, surged more than 300% intraday, briefly touching around $0.4, with trading volume expanding to hundreds of millions of shares. A micro-cap company that was hovering around $0.12 a few days ago with a market cap of over $4 million suddenly became the brightest star on the board.

On-chain, a coin called "FAMI" was also rising along with Jinqian, both being pumped simultaneously, and its market cap at one point exceeded $100 million.

The story starts two days ago.

A Good Narrative

On August 31, crypto trader Rune (@RuneCrypto_) tweeted: He spent about $1.8 million to buy 37.4% of a low-market-cap Nasdaq company over the counter (OTC). The numbers he reported were very specific: market cap about $4.8 million, stock price about $0.12, short interest 92.3%. Almost the entire float of this stock had been borrowed and shorted.

He didn't hide his next plan: tokenize this stock on Robinhood's chain, then issue a paired meme coin, use on-chain funds to buy the underlying stock, and squeeze the shorts. A short squeeze means forcing those who borrowed shares to short to buy back and cover at the highest point.

This looks like a good story at first glance. Short squeezes are a narrative ingrained in Robinhood.

On January 28, 2021, GameStop touched $483 intraday. A month earlier, it was lying at $18. Retail investors on Reddit turned a brick-and-mortar store selling game discs into Wall Street's nightmare: short sellers had borrowed more than 100% of the float, waiting for it to go bankrupt, but instead they were squeezed until they bled. The leader was Keith Gill, known online as Roaring Kitty, who showed his position grow from $53,000 to $48 million and said to the camera: "I like the stock."

So when Rune's story came out, the rest was just waiting to see which company he picked, because the community found that no Nasdaq stock could simultaneously match all the numbers he reported.

But when sentiment runs high, people stop caring about details.

When the community discovered the strange FAMI and Jinqian on September 2, they quickly connected these elements: Farmmi, Nasdaq ticker FAMI, a company in the edible mushroom business, with a product called Jinqian mushroom, and an extremely small market cap. All the US stock meme elements were there. Let's jump in.

Sentiment quickly overheated.

On-chain FAMI surged 10x in an hour. Trading volume quickly broke through $100 million. People rushed into the Jinqian/FAMI pool to provide liquidity: 4% fee? Go. Slippage? Doesn't matter.

The underlying stock wasn't idle either. Nasdaq's FAMI surged over 300% intraday, briefly touching $0.39–0.47, with volume expanding to hundreds of millions of shares. On-chain FAMI's market cap peaked at around $100 million, about ten to twenty times the entire market cap of the underlying company. A mushroom company that usually no one pays attention to saw single-day trading volume equal to the total of the past few years.

Why It Might Be a Scam

When sentiment got overheated, Rune came out to respond.

It wasn't him, he said. That so-called acquisition statement, "I bought 37.4%" "I plan to tokenize and squeeze shorts," was written by Claude and posted by him. The person who actually issued the coin and set up the pool on-chain was someone else who borrowed his idea.

After sentiment cooled, someone dug into the on-chain address that issued the coin. The truth is far more precise than the narrative.

The on-chain FAMI contract was deployed on September 1 at 21:34 (UTC), a new coin minted just the previous afternoon.

Total token supply: 37,430,000 tokens. And Farmmi's stock happens to have a figure of about 37.43 million shares. The numbers match perfectly.

The deployer's first action was not buying, but minting: transferring 14,223,400 tokens to himself from the zero address. Let's do the math:

14,223,400 ÷ 37,430,000 ≈ 38.0%, which is the 37.4% Rune mentioned.

Even the ratio of reserved tokens was scripted. The minter wanted everyone to believe: this is Rune operating.

But more important than truth or falsehood is another thing: this scheme was missing a piece from the start.

Robinhood has a hard threshold for its stock tokens, clearly stated in official documentation: only official contract addresses are recognized. Same name, same ticker, but different contract address means it's not a Robinhood stock token. On-chain stock tokens can only be minted by designated authorized participants through subscription to Robinhood Assets (Jersey), backed by custodied shares. A community-issued token with the same name doesn't count. You can buy and sell FAMI stock in the US stock app, but that's the brokerage page, completely different from on-chain stock tokens.

The official asset list has over a hundred tickers—CRM, JNJ, LLY, QCOM—but no FAMI, no Farmmi.

That is to say, there is no FAMI stock token on the Robinhood chain at all. The FAMI that surged is just a token with the same name, having nothing to do with the stock, minted just on September 1.

What does this mean? The real US stock meme play—using stock tokens as the other side of the pool, locking them, pricing against them—requires that the stock first be on the official list and have an official stock token. FAMI is not on the list at all. There has never been 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 buying meme → demand for tokenized stock → issuer buying underlying stock on Nasdaq to squeeze shorts—only holds when "that stock actually has an official stock token." FAMI is not on the list.

The narrative is a good narrative. Shorted small-cap stock, on-chain linkage, short squeeze—every word hits the nerves of Robinhood retail investors.

Unfortunately, the best narrative fears the wolf arriving. Can retail investors really not win?

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