Crypto traders who once chased meme coins are now piling into AI and semiconductor stocks with the same playbook.
Meanwhile, hedge funds are quietly lining up on the other side to take their money, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday.
The Same Playbook, New Assets
Bloomberg profiled Rahul Patel, a crypto founder who moved from trading meme coins to betting on AI and semiconductor stocks after finding the underlying businesses gave him something meme coins rarely did: revenue, production targets, and clear catalysts to test trades against.
Rahul Patel — Crypto Founder (Bloomberg Profile)
“It’s a lot better of an experience. You can sleep on your bags. Memecoins, for the longest time, you haven’t been able to sleep on your bags.”
That shift is showing up directly in exchange volume. Contracts tracking SK Hynix (OTC:HXSCL), Micron Technology (NASDAQ:MU), and SanDisk Corp (NASDAQ:SNDK) drew more than $8 billion on Hyperliquid last week alone, according to tracker hl.eco.
Binance Stock Contract Volume — February to July 2026
| Period | Daily Volume |
| February 2026 | $85M/day |
| July 2026 | $5.5B/day (+6,370%) |
The $85M to $5.5B daily volume expansion on Binance in five months is a 6,370% increase in a market that barely existed at the start of 2026.
The playbook behind those numbers looks identical to the memecoin era.
An anonymous X account surfaces an under-the-radar name, followers pile in, and the buying itself becomes part of the investment case — the same feedback loop that once pushed obscure tokens to billion-dollar market caps.
Why Analysts Think This Ends Badly
However, Citrini Research analyst Jukan Choe told Bloomberg the pattern is not sustainable.
“I think it’s a very unhealthy kind of trading,” Choe said. “That kind of share price rally isn’t based on fundamentals — it’s a tower of liquidity built up by retail investors, so after a while, it’s almost bound to collapse quickly,” he added.
Leverage makes the risk sharper. On Hyperliquid, traders can go long or short on stocks with up to 20 times leverage using perpetual futures that never expire.
When demand for long positions becomes heavily one-sided, longs pay shorts to keep positions open, creating a funding rate that hedge funds are now specifically targeting.
Who Is Taking The Other Side
South Korea-based hedge fund Hyperithm sources shares of names like SK Hynix through local prime brokers, then shorts the perpetuals on crypto exchanges to collect the funding payments retail demand generates, according to CEO Sangrok Oh.
“Our view is that retail demand creates the gaps and institutionalization narrows some of them,” Oh told Bloomberg, adding the inefficiencies remain structurally present for firms with superior models as long as markets stay fragmented.
When too many traders crowd the same side, a small move against them forces selling that pushes prices lower and triggers more selling, the same feedback loop that destroyed leveraged crypto positions now playing out in AI stocks.
Photo via Shutterstock
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