Pepe’s Sudden Drop Leaves a 500k Whale in Red
Just days after hitting an all-time high on May 6, the price of new memecoin Pepe (PEPE) has fallen by more than 42%, leaving at least one investor with hundreds of thousands of paper losses.
On May 5, one crypto “whale” paid for 962.3 billion Pepe tokens with 70 Wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC) and 470 Ether (ETH) at an average price of $0.000003122, according to blockchain analytics service Lookonchain.
According to CoinGecko, PEPE has fallen 42% from its all-time high. The crypto investor PEPE’s holdings are now estimated to be worth only $2.4 million, representing an unrealized loss of $600,000.
Despite the recent price drop, Pepe still has a market capitalization of over $1 billion, ranking him 45th in the overall valuation. Pepe has garnered widespread attention since it started on April 14, having seen trading volume of over $636 million in the last 24 hours and burning over 5,000 ETH in gas-related fees via a Uniswap trade on May 5.
While the price of memecoin is highly volatile, the number of individual holders has steadily increased over the past three weeks. At the time of publication, there were 144,534 individual token holders, according to Dune Analytics data.
Following a huge spike in Bitcoin activity involving BRC-20 related transactions, the rise of memecoin mania has also caused fees on the Bitcoin network of up to $28,363 to soar to a two-year high.
Since the creation of the most famous meme-based cryptocurrency, Dogecoin $0.08, in 2013, memecoin has played a role in the cryptocurrency industry. It should be noted that, due to a lack of fundamentals, investing in memecoins can be a dangerous trading strategy, with huge amounts of wealth being created and destroyed in equal measure.
