Memecoin season continues to churn out life-changing exchanges for people ready to take a chance.
An anonymous wallet purchased 2.79 billion ASTEROID tokens for $575 on April 17 and sold the entire position for 503 ETH on Tuesday, worth about $1.17 million, according to on-chain tracker Lookonchain. The round trip took five days and produced a return of more than 2,000 times.
ASTEROID is an Ethereum-based memecoin called “First Shiba In Space”. It is themed after a Shiba Inu drawing by Liv Perrotto, a teenage cancer patient who died in January 2026 after a five-year battle with the disease.
Two years before her death, Perrotto drew the dog while volunteering with SpaceX’s Polaris Dawn ground support team. The design, inspired by Elon Musk’s Shiba Inu named Floki, flew on the Polaris Dawn mission in September 2024 as the crew’s weightlessness indicator.
Before her passing, Perrotto wrote down eight questions she hoped to ask Musk. The last asked if Asteroid could become the official mascot of SpaceX. His mother shared the list publicly after his death, and media personality Glenn Beck amplified it on April 16. The post went viral, reached Musk, and he said “okay” in response to making Asteroid the official mascot of SpaceX.
This response ignited the token. ASTEROID’s market cap rose from around $50,000 to over $20 million within hours of Musk’s response, then surpassed $100 million over the next few days on a 24-hour trading volume of over $100 million.
At its peak, the token briefly entered the top 200 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization. As of Wednesday morning in Europe, it is trading at $0.0004435 with a market cap of $186.5 million and $24 million in 24-hour volume.
The token has no formal endorsement from SpaceX, no licensing agreements, and no confirmed involvement from Musk beyond responses on social media.
It trades on Uniswap against wrapped ether with a market cap of $186.5 million and a trading volume of $24.3 million. The price is up 20.69% over 24 hours, 28.54% over six hours and is up approximately 10 times from the wallet’s entry point on April 17, according to DEX Screener data.
