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Peanut the Squirrel

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Peanut the Squirrel
Peanut the Squirrel
Image: token logo via CoinGecko / DexScreener listings
tickerPNUT
blockchainSolana
launchedNovember 2024
peak market capabout 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.

Contents
  1. 1 Origin
  2. 2 Market history
  3. 3 Drama
  4. 4 Cultural impact
  5. 5 References

Peanut the Squirrel (PNUT) is a meme coin on the Solana blockchain commemorating Peanut, a pet Eastern gray squirrel that mechanical engineer Mark Longo rescued as an orphaned baby in New York City in 2017 and kept for years before New York State authorities seized and euthanized him in late October 2024. Launched on pump.fun in the first days of November 2024, PNUT reached a 1 billion dollar market capitalization in about 11 days, the fastest climb to that milestone of any animal themed meme coin CoinGecko has tracked, before continuing on to a peak near a 2 billion dollar valuation in mid November 2024.

Origin

Longo rescued baby Peanut in 2017 after the squirrel's mother was killed by a car in New York City. He bottle fed the squirrel for about eight months and attempted to release it back into the wild; Peanut returned about a day and a half later, injured, with half his tail missing, and Longo kept him from then on, illegally under New York's ban on squirrel ownership without a permit. By October 2024 Peanut's Instagram account had about 534,000 followers, and Longo ran P'Nuts Freedom Farm animal sanctuary in Chemung County, New York, having relocated there from Norwalk, Connecticut in April 2023; he used Peanut's fame to promote his own OnlyFans account.

The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) raided Longo's Pine City, New York home on October 30, 2024, after receiving anonymous complaints about illegal wildlife possession. Agents seized both Peanut and a raccoon named Fred, finding Peanut in a bathroom and Fred hidden in luggage; Longo says the five hour operation involved excessive force. Both animals were euthanized to test for rabies, since no approved live test exists; results came back negative on November 12, 2024.

Days before a US presidential election, the story became a political symbol of government overreach, amplified by Elon Musk and other high profile accounts. Donald Trump Jr. wrote "Justice for Peanut! Our government will let in 16,000 rapists, they will let in 13,000 murderers... but if someone has a pet squirrel without a permit, they will kill the squirrel." JD Vance posted that Trump himself was "fired up about P'Nut the squirrel." On November 14, 2024, sitting Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch invoked Peanut by name in his keynote at the Federalist Society's annual dinner as an example of government overreach, telling the room "I've just seen too many cases like that... Yes, I'm speaking of P'nut the squirrel," and also joked about Longo's OnlyFans side hustle. 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 posted a Star Wars reference, "Obi PNut Kenobi," on November 2, 2024, pushing the market cap to about 125 million dollars; on November 13, 2024 he posted "The prophecy has been fulfilled," after which the coin jumped again toward an 850 million dollar market cap. A Binance spot listing on November 11, 2024, announced alongside ACT, produced one of the era's famous "god candles." PNUT reached a 1 billion dollar market capitalization in about 11 days from launch, the fastest of any animal themed meme coin CoinGecko has tracked, about 135 times faster than Dogecoin's 1,487 days to the same milestone, and faster than PEPE's 19 days, GOAT's 37, and WIF's 81. The token continued climbing to an all time high price of 2.47 dollars on November 14, 2024, the same day as the Gorsuch speech, an implied market capitalization near 2 billion dollars. PNUT was listed on Coinbase, with trading going live January 14, 2025, and it remained listed there as of 2026. The token then entered a long decline; a June 2026 snapshot put it around 0.042 dollars, consistent with a market capitalization near 40 million dollars, a level it still traded near as of August 2026.

Drama

Longo turned against the coin and its biggest exchange listing. He publicly denounced the PNUT community for profiting off his squirrel's death, and around November 26, 2024 launched his own rival token, "Justice for Peanut and Fred" (reported under the tickers JUSTICE and JFP in different coverage), on pump.fun, calling it the "only real PNUT coin"; it later fell over 95 percent from its own highs. On December 16, 2024, Longo, posting as @Squirrel_Dad12, sent Binance a cease and desist letter through his law firm, accusing the exchange of using the "Peanut the Squirrel" trademark and the squirrel's cowboy hat image without permission for its PNUT listing, and demanding compliance by December 31, 2024, citing potential penalties up to $150,000 per infringement; Binance did not respond publicly, and no public resolution of the dispute has been reported. Longo and his partner Daniela Bittner filed a formal $10 million lawsuit against the New York DEC and Department of Health in the New York Court of Claims on August 7, 2025, alleging Fourth and Fourteenth Amendment violations over the seizure and killing; a January 2025 tweet indicates Longo was already pursuing legal action against multiple parties tied to the PNUT token by that point. Neither the Longo versus New York lawsuit nor the Longo versus Binance dispute had a reported outcome as of mid 2026. The net effect is that the coin's own namesake became an adversary of the project and its biggest listing partner, entirely separate from the coin's underlying tokenomics, where contract mint and freeze authority were revoked and liquidity was burned.

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

See also
  • PENGU PENGU is the Solana token of the Pudgy Penguins NFT brand, launched via a large airdrop in
  • Pepe Pepe is a frog themed meme coin launched on Ethereum in April 2023 that became the largest
  • Pippin Pippin is a Solana AI agent token built around a stick figure unicorn created by BabyAGI a
  • PONKE PONKE is a Solana meme coin fronted by an angry cartoon monkey styled as a degenerate gamb
  • Pons Pons ($PONS) is the token of Pons.family, the dominant memecoin launchpad on Robinhood Cha
Category: Coins
Last updated 2026-08-19