Peanut the squirrel was put down by New York state in October 2024. The token built around him is still trading. Eighteen months later, at $0.0516 and a $51.6M market cap, one thing is clear: PNUT outlived the event by a wide margin. The panda watches. The panda judges.
From a rescue squirrel to a $1.6B token in 10 days
October 2024. The New York Department of Environmental Conservation confiscated a domestic squirrel from a content creator. The squirrel was euthanized. The internet did what the internet does in 2024: it tokenized the outrage.
PNUT launched on Solana within days. According to the Peanut the Squirrel Wikipedia timeline, it crossed a $1.6B market cap in under two weeks. Total supply: 999.85M. All in circulation. No vesting, no cliffs, no foundation reserve. Just one billion tokens of pure event narrative.
Then came November 11, 2024. Binance listed PNUT, and the chart did what charts do when Binance lists a meme: it ran up 478% on the news. The all-time high hit $2.44 on November 14, 2024, three days after the listing, according to CoinMarketCap's PNUT historical data.
Three days to peak. Eighteen months to find out what happens next.
What does PNUT look like 18 months later?
The numbers are clean. According to CoinGecko's PNUT page, PNUT trades at $0.05166 with a $51.6M market cap. 24-hour volume sits at $12.6M. That puts the token down roughly 97% from the November 2024 peak.
For context, the broader market is hardly euphoric this week. CoinGecko shows total crypto market cap at $2.53T, down 2.66% on the day, with Bitcoin at $72.8K. PNUT is not crashing into a bull tape. It is bleeding alongside a flat market, which is in some ways worse.
What's interesting is what didn't happen. PNUT didn't go to zero. The supply is fully circulating, the contract is widely held, the float is liquid enough to clear $12M a day. As event-driven memecoins go, this is a soft landing. Most don't last a quarter.
Spoiler: we saw the soft landing coming. Animal-meme tokens with a clear name and a Binance ticker tend to attrit slowly rather than rug, because there is no team to disappear. The flip side: there is no team to build either.
The Binance listing, and the lawsuit that followed
In April 2025, Mark Longo (the squirrel's actual owner) filed legal action against Binance for IP infringement, according to BeInCrypto. His complaint: Binance used Peanut's name, the PNUT branding, and a copyrighted image of the squirrel in a cowboy hat to promote a token Longo had no contractual link to.
There is a real legal question buried in there. When an exchange lists a memecoin named after a real animal whose likeness belongs to a private person, who owes whom? The pattern is everywhere. DOGE, SHIB, BRETT, GIGA, the entire animal-meme cluster runs on visual IP that nobody licensed.
The panda raises an eyebrow not at the lawsuit. The panda raises an eyebrow at how long it took for someone to try.
Two months later, Longo launched his own token, Justice for Peanut (JFP). Per Crypto.news coverage of the JFP launch, JFP touched a $116M market cap on launch hype, then dropped over 95% in the weeks that followed. Today it sits around $3M.
Two takeaways. First: a token branded "the only real PNUT" pulled $116M of attention in a day. That is the bull case for animal-meme equity even now. Second: the same token lost 95% of its valuation within weeks. That is the bear case, on the same chart.
Community reaction was, predictably, split. Some saw the owner defending Peanut's legacy. Others saw a second cash-out from the same well. Both sides are right and neither will agree. As always in crypto.
What this says about event-driven memecoins
PNUT is now a case study, not a trade. The lifecycle is becoming legible:
- A real-world event with mass emotional pull.
- A 10-day launch curve to $1B+ market cap.
- A Binance listing that prints the local top.
- A 90%+ retracement over the following year.
- An owner or community figure relaunching to catch a second wave.
- A long, quiet, mid-cap existence that nobody covers.
Compare it to our look at MOODENG and its three exchange listings, or scan the full memecoin cluster on Dadacoin Blog for adjacent case studies. Same template, slightly different animal.
The honest read: PNUT at $51M is not a failure. It is the steady state of an event token that survived its event. The Solana memecoin economy is full of these now: small caps with no team, no roadmap, no obvious catalyst, and still a million dollars a day in volume. They are, in the panda's view, the new mid-tier altcoins of 2026.
Whether that is healthy for retail is a different question. The numbers say yes. The panda lifts an eyebrow.
What to watch next
Two things. First, the Binance versus Longo IP case. If it goes anywhere on the merits, every exchange listing of an animal-named token gets a legal review checkbox added. That alters the supply of new event memes more than any market move could. Second, JFP. If a second relaunch from the original owner finds a floor above $5M, the "owner restart" pattern becomes part of the playbook. If it does not, it dies as an interesting footnote.
For Dadacoin, which lives on BSC and on the satirical end of the memecoin spectrum, PNUT is a useful mirror. No, you do not need a viral animal to outlast a cycle. You need a circulating supply, a working contract, and a community that knows what it bought. Two of those three are easier than they look. The third is harder than anyone admits.
The panda continues to watch.
