Peanut the Squirrel
 | |
| ticker | PNUT |
|---|---|
| blockchain | Solana |
| launched | November 2024 |
| peak market cap | about 2 billion dollars (November 2024) |
Peanut the Squirrel is a Solana meme coin launched in November 2024 after New York authorities euthanized a pet squirrel, an event that became a political flashpoint amplified by Elon Musk.
Peanut the Squirrel (PNUT) is a meme coin on the Solana blockchain commemorating Peanut, a pet Eastern gray squirrel seized and euthanized by New York State authorities in late October 2024. Launched on pump.fun in the first days of November 2024, it became one of the fastest coins ever to reach a multibillion dollar valuation.
Origin
Peanut lived with Mark Longo, who ran an animal sanctuary and had built a large social media following around the squirrel. On October 30, 2024, the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation seized Peanut under wildlife ownership rules; after a reported bite during the raid, the animal was euthanized for rabies testing, which came back negative. Days before a US presidential election, the story became a political symbol of government overreach, amplified by Elon Musk and other high profile accounts. An anonymous deployer launched PNUT on pump.fun on November 1, 2024; Longo was not involved in the token's creation.
Market history
PNUT's ascent tracked the news cycle. Musk's posts about the squirrel repeatedly moved the price, with reporting tying jumps to market capitalizations of 125 million and then 850 million dollars in the week after the election. A Binance spot listing on November 11, 2024, announced alongside ACT, produced one of the era's famous "god candles," and PNUT exceeded a 2 billion dollar market capitalization within roughly 11 days of launch, with its all time high price near 2.47 dollars in mid November 2024. The token then entered a long decline; by August 2026 it traded around 0.04 dollars with a market capitalization near 40 million dollars.
Cultural impact
PNUT is the defining example of the November 2024 "news meta," when real world events were tokenized and traded like prediction markets with leverage. It demonstrated the full pipeline, from viral tragedy to pump.fun deployment to top tier exchange listing, compressing into days what earlier cycles took months to do. The episode also fed the era's blurring of meme coins and politics: Peanut was invoked in campaign discourse, and the coin's chart became inseparable from the American election news cycle in trench lore.
References
- https://fortune.com/2024/11/04/elon-musk-peanut-the-squirrel-mark-longo-election-donald-trump/
- https://101blockchains.com/peanut-the-squirrel-pnut/
- https://u.today/elon-musk-pushes-market-cap-of-squirrel-based-meme-coin-to-125-million
- https://www.cryptotimes.io/2024/11/04/pnut-memecoin-soars-amid-justice-for-squirrel-ledd-by-musk/
- https://crypto.news/new-binance-listings-god-candle-led-by-act-and-pnut/
- https://www.coingabbar.com/en/crypto-blogs-details/best-meme-coins-in-august-2026-top-picks-based-on-trends
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