Watch out as r/Wallstreetbets finally allows crypto threads... within limits

The moderators of subreddit r/Wallstreetbets have announced they will allow crypto discussion in the subreddit from today.

The retail trading group, famous for pumping traditional stocks such as GameStop (GME) and scaring hedge fund managers out of their shorts — which is soon to be a major movie — will limit discussion to three cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin (BTC), Ether (ETH) and Dogecoin (DOGE) in a single daily thread. A post this morning stated:

“We’ve decided to allow for discussion about only BTC, ETH, and DOGE only. Inside of a daily Crypto discussion thread as to not burden everyone with crypto spam. All rules will still apply outside of the thread but for now please keep it in the daily thread only as we gauge if this is something that is right for our sub.”

Subreddit moderator u/bawse1 noted that for years they’d “tried to delay discussion about crypto on the sub for many reasons,” with the main concern being that r/Wallstreetbets didn’t want crypto discussions to detract from the group’s core focus on the stock market. However, despite some members “hating crypto,” the moderator noted that the subreddit aims to make all members welcome amid the growing appetite for crypto in the past year:

“I’ve known at some point that r/wallstreetbets will have to find a place for it. As much as some of us hate it, there are just as many that love it and the way I’ve always tried to shape the sub is to never gatekeep, allow everyone to feel welcome, and always be able to adapt. I don’t see the point in delaying the inevitable anymore as crypto is here to stay.”

The move may partly be a response to the crypto version of r/Wallstreetbets, r/SatoshiStreetBets, which has acquired 384,000 members since it started in February last year. Then again, that pales into insignificance against the 9.8 million degens that r/Wallstreetbets has attracted since 2012, many of whom joined in the light of the GameStop saga earlier this year.

Around the time r/Wallstreetbets collectively pumped GME, data from TradingView shows the price went from roughly $60 on Jan. 22 to around $340 on Jan. 28, which resulted in trading platform Robinhood halting trades on the stock to allegedly protect the positions of the hedge funds who were shorting the market.

The saga of how the little guys took on the hedge funds and won is set to hit screens after Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios secured the rights to a book proposal depicting the “short squeeze” by author Ben Mezrich, who also wrote The Social Network, a book and film about Mark Zuckerberg and the rise of Facebook.

Mezrich is also behind Bitcoin Billionaires about Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, which is also being turned into a movie after Stampede Ventures partnered with the twins in June 2020 to produce it.

Around the time of the pump, there was talk the group may throw its weight behind Dogecoin, and if it did, the highly coveted $1 price point may be a possibility.

Dogecoin rallied around 80% to hit its all-time peak of $0.14 in the past 24 hours and now sits as the 11th largest crypto by market cap, according to data from CoinGecko. Despite its “meme coin” status and history of volatility, the coin is up 6,196% in the past 12 months.