Party hat mania

In RuneScape, gp is gold, the game's money. Christmas crackers were a holiday item that, when pulled, dropped party hats: six colors, never made again, and for twenty years the rarest things in the game. On 8 September someone launched a coin called RuneScape Gold, ticker GP, on StonkFun. It was paired not with SOL but with GLDX, a tokenized gold, and like every StonkFun reward coin it charged a 3% tax on every transfer and paid it out to holders.

GP opened near $20,000 in market value. By 21 September it was worth $10 million. Nobody has publicly claimed the wallet that created it; a project account, @GPonchain, runs a site called the Grand Exchange, after the game's market.

The stack came next. On 17 September a coin called Christmas Cracker, CRACKER, launched paired with GP. On 23 September came the party hats, WHITE and BLUE first, each paired with CRACKER. The design fed itself downward: buying a hat meant buying CRACKER first, buying CRACKER meant buying GP, and each layer's tax was paid to the holders of the layer below.

The loudest voice was Ryan Trost, a trader with about 37,000 followers on X, who laid the plan out in public in numbered phases. On 22 September he wrote that GP had returned to the $10-15 million range, that StonkFun itself had bought back and burned both GP and CRACKER, and that he was "currently holding nearly a quarter of the cracker supply." He predicted "Party Hat Mania" and called it "GME style fuel." In the same post he described the strain: the nested taxes had "forced the treasury to indiscriminately nuke out to cover the clog of rewards."

It peaked on the 23rd and 24th. GP closed a four-hour candle at $27.7 million. CRACKER reached $5.8 million. On the evening of the 24th Trost announced CRACKER grants: he and others would seed CRACKER and GP into all six party hats "as we continue to buyback and burn."

The cracks had already started. Early on the 25th an account called MidCurveMortal posted a thread alleging that insider wallets had bought GP and two other StonkFun coins before their runs and farmed most of the holder rewards. A defender, @bitcoinPalmer, answered that one of the big early GP wallets belonged to a trader he knew personally who had bought at a $19,000 market value and "hadnt sold a single wallet." Our earlier check of that thread found its transactions real but no link from the largest flagged wallets to StonkFun's team.

Then came the night of the 25th. Between the daily closes of 25 and 26 September, GP lost 58% of its value, CRACKER lost 91%, and the party hats lost most of theirs. Within hours, one trader accused Trost and @AviFelman, a former portfolio manager with 109,000 followers, of "panic dumping every single promising $GP pair" at the bottom. Another trader pushed back that Avi "really didn't do anything but hold his coins," and blamed the design: "Pairing 20 coins vs an illiquid low cap meme." By the 27th MidCurveMortal was calling @pointfarmcap, another account that had promoted the coins, a "STONK paid actor" who had sold everything.

Late on the 27th GP was still worth $4.7 million, 83% below its peak. CRACKER was worth $122,000. The white and blue party hats were worth about $13,000 and $15,000. The same nesting that pushed every buy down into GP on the way up pushed every sale through CRACKER on the way down.