One Nvidia token ran 8% above four others. Meme coins hit a thin pool, and few new tokens came in

01 · Sunday 8 NovemberFour Nvidia prices fell, one rose

On Sunday 8 November, one Nvidia token cost about 8% more than four others. All five are meant to track the same share. Their buyers pay in digital dollars, and the share itself was not trading. The gap held for four and a half hours. Then, at 8pm in New York, it closed within two minutes.

A tokenized stock is a token on a blockchain that follows one company's share. The company that sells it, called the issuer, says it holds a real share for each token. Five Nvidia tokens trade in volume; their product names are xStocks and Backpack on Solana, and Binance bStocks, Robinhood and Coinbase on other chains. The odd one out that evening was Backpack's. Backpack is a crypto exchange, and its brokerage arm, Backpack Securities, issues its stock tokens.

Bitquery records every trade and transfer on these blockchains. We pulled the full record of trades and transfers in the two Solana tokens for that evening. Meme coins, tokens with no business behind them that people buy for the joke and a quick gain, appeared about Nvidia's news and were priced in Backpack's token. They pulled it out of its pools faster than new tokens arrived. The xStocks token also had meme coins priced in it, and held. Its pools were deeper, and tokens kept coming into them.

02 · How the tokens tradePools set the price, and refill only from outside

To compare token prices on a Sunday we need a price that keeps moving. We used a perpetual contract on Nvidia that trades on Hyperliquid around the clock: a contract that tracks Nvidia's price with no end date, priced by its own traders. We call it the round-the-clock price. It is a derivative, a contract priced from the share rather than the share itself, but four of the five tokens agreed with it that evening.

Most trading in these tokens happens in pools. A pool is a pot of tokens and digital dollars, or SOL, Solana's own coin, that trades with anyone at a price set by what is left in the pot. We call these a token's dollar pools; anyone can supply them, and we count what sits in them in units of the token. Buy tokens from it and the price rises. When a token's price runs above the round-the-clock price, a trader can sell units into the pot and bring the price back. That works if traders hold units to sell, or can get new ones.

New units come in by different routes. Backpack's reach the blockchain in one way: a Backpack customer who already holds an Nvidia share there withdraws it as a token, for a fee of about 50 cents. Backpack's published hours open most stocks for buying on Sunday at 8pm in New York, and its list of weekend stocks did not name Nvidia.

03 · The gapFour tokens followed the price down; Backpack's rose

The round-the-clock price fell about 4% that evening. Nvidia's board said that Sunday, according to TechCrunch and NBC News, that it had opened an investigation involving its chief executive. Four of the tokens followed the price down. Backpack's went the other way.

The xStocks token never strayed more than 0.3% from the round-the-clock price in any five minutes of those four and a half hours. Backpack's averaged 8% above it, and its widest half-hour, just after midnight UTC, was 13%. From 21:00 UTC, every busy dollar pool for Backpack's token sat within about one percentage point of the others in each half-hour. There was no cheaper dollar pool to buy from.

04 · The demandMeme coins priced in one stock token

The largest meme coin about the news began trading at 20:21 UTC, priced in Backpack's Nvidia token rather than in dollars. More followed fast: within the hour, 55 coins priced in the token were trading.

Most of the largest coin's buying went through Backpack's token, often in the same transaction. Of the coins bought, 80% were paid for with the token. Of the token's own purchases, leaving out traders who bought and sold it in one go, 88% went straight into a coin. The coin's address is in the method notes.

Backpack units piled up in the coins' pools, which held more than four times as many at 01:00 UTC as at 20:30. They came out of the token's dollar pools, and out of small pools that swap it for the xStocks token.

05 · Why one tokenThinner pools, more demand, few new tokens

Backpack's supply barely moved before the open: about 2,500 units, worth roughly half a million dollars at the round-the-clock price. More than 120 times as many xStocks Nvidia units existed, and that supply did not rise all weekend. Neither supply grew before the open. The difference lay in what sat in the pools and what came into them.

Three things set Backpack's token apart, and they all pushed the same way. The xStocks token's dollar pools held 8 times as many units. The meme coins took in 2.6 times as many Backpack units as xStocks units. And few new units arrived: 68, sent out from Backpack's exchange wallet in amounts that match customer withdrawals, while 24 were turned back into shares. Over the same hours the xStocks token's pools gained about 500 units from outside, as holders sold into them. Exchange wallets moved xStocks units both ways. They sent about 1,400 to other wallets, most of them to a market maker, a firm that keeps buy and sell prices quoted, and took in about as many.

A few small pools swap one Nvidia token for the other. In the first hour they traded about 1,200 times, close to one token for one, while the dollar pools rose to 9% above the round-the-clock price. Then they ran dry, and after 21:00 UTC they barely traded.

06 · Two busy walletsLiquidity moved, but no new tokens

Outside the pools, holders had little to sell. When the gap opened, 80% of all Backpack Nvidia units already sat in pools; the rest were spread across about 1,800 wallets.

Two wallets funded from one address were the largest net buyers outside the coins. From just before the gap opened they bought about 960 more units than they sold. They moved units and dollars into the largest dollar pool as liquidity, what a pool trades from. They sent about 1,650 units into that pool and took back about 770; three of their transactions decoded as deposits carrying both together. Little more than an hour later the two wallets had stopped adding liquidity, and they ended the evening holding no Backpack units. They recycled units already in the pools and brought in only about 50.0 of their own.

07 · The close8pm in New York

At 8pm on Sunday in New York, 01:00 UTC, new tokens arrived. The first came six seconds after the hour, and more than a thousand followed within the minute. The gap fell from 11% in the minute before to about 1% in the minute after, and was gone a minute later.

08 · What it meansSellers or new tokens keep a stock token in line

A stock token stays near its share's price when holders sell into its pools as the price runs high, or when new units can be made and sold. The xStocks token had the first. Backpack's token had neither in size until 8pm in New York. For a market maker, two things decide whether a stock token holds. One is how many units sit in its pools against the demand that can hit them. The other is the hours when its issuer lets new units be made.

Most of the trading was two-way. On net flows, the pools and order books that trade Backpack's token for USDC took about $50,000 above the round-the-clock price over the four and a half hours. That came on $12.5 million of USDC trades. We did not measure what each coin buyer, holder or liquidity provider gained or lost.

This is one evening and two tokens. We checked four weeks of trades in the Backpack and xStocks tokens of nine stocks. None of the other busy half-hours, more than 6,600 of them, was more than about 2% from its round-the-clock price. Meme coins priced in stock tokens were not limited to Backpack's token: 558 coins priced in the xStocks Nvidia token traded in the same hours.

09 · How we did itMethod

Trades come from Bitquery's DEX data, and transfers, new tokens and tokens turned back into shares from our Solana transfer records. The window runs from Sunday afternoon to 8pm in New York, 20:30 to 01:00 UTC; the charts show a few hours either side. Chart and five-minute prices are dollar-weighted averages of trades of $10 or more in USDC, a digital dollar. The five-token table uses all digital-dollar trades of $10 or more within 5% of each five-minute median. The round-the-clock price is the last trade, in each five seconds, of a perpetual contract on Nvidia that trades on Hyperliquid.

Tokens in a pool are the pool's balance from every transfer since the token began. Some program accounts hold tokens for many meme-coin pools at once, so coin-pool figures are totals. Tokens a pool gained from outside are its change in balance over the window, which nets trades against liquidity added and removed. Exchange wallets are those carrying an exchange's hot-wallet or proof-of-reserves label among the top 100 senders and receivers that evening.

The largest coin's address is FZxHLUGiGchY5uvvoeqh1EKiXTrGdN67WUBhUc1fLoat. Backpack's Nvidia token is NVDAVuiB7hwd3m5Wa1JuHNovPaPG6BH1QNztbKFxNjv and the xStocks token is Xsc9qvGR1efVDFGLrVsmkzv3qi45LTBjeUKSPmx9qEh. The full Solana history behind these figures is also sold as files on the Bitquery Data Store, and the other tokens' chains are in its dataset catalog.

We did not ask Backpack for comment before publishing. Its hours and token rules come from its published pages; we did not see its order book that evening.

FAQ

Why did Backpack's Nvidia token trade above the other Nvidia tokens on 8 November?

Meme coins about Nvidia's news that day were priced in Backpack's token. Most of the buying of the largest coin was paid with that token, which drew it out of its pools. Those pools were small, and only 68 new units reached the blockchain before 8pm New York time.

How are Backpack's tokenized stocks created?

A Backpack customer who holds a share at Backpack Securities withdraws it to Solana as a token, for a fee of about 50 cents. Depositing the token turns it back into the share.

Why did the xStocks Nvidia token stay in line?

Its dollar pools held 8 times as many units, and meme coins took in the equal of 3% of what sat in them. Those pools also gained about 500 units from outside over the evening.

What is the round-the-clock price used here?

The last trade price, every five seconds, of a perpetual contract on Nvidia that trades on Hyperliquid at all hours. It is a derivative price set by its own traders. Four of the five Nvidia tokens stayed close to it that evening.