Pepe has fallen 56% in the past five days, wiping out $1 billion in total market value.
New memecoin Pepe (PEPE) has seen its market cap drop by $1.1 billion from its May 6 peak, even as on-chain data shows it is still being bought by some crypto whales.
According to Coingecko data, in the five days between May 6 and May 10, the price of memecoin plummeted by more than 56%, from a peak of $0.00000431 to $0.00000193.
Pepe’s price drop has caused the token’s total valuation to drop from a peak of $1.82 billion on May 6 to $820 million at the time of publication.
A May 8 report written by researchers at cryptocurrency fintech firm Matrixport attributed Pepe’s sharp price drop to traders selling large holdings to new retail investors after the memecoin was listed on Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange by daily trading volume.
Furthermore, the report found that the biggest driver of Pepe’s rapid price increase since its inception on April 14 appears to have come from traders in Asia. According to Matrixport data, buying activity during Asian trading hours contributed a staggering 3,657% of the total 9,071% gain witnessed by the memecoin as of May 8.
Another data point that could provide more validation to this theory is that within 24 hours of memecoin being listed on exchanges, Ethereum deposits surged to their highest level since November 2021.
Crypto market intelligence firm Santiment believes this is largely due to early buyers of Pepe taking profits by moving their holdings back into Ether, primarily through ETH swap purchases on decentralized exchanges like Uniswap and 1inch.
Despite the dramatic price drop over the past week, some of the more well-known and infamous whales in the crypto space are still buying Pepe at lower prices.
According to blockchain analytics firm Lookonchain, “Machi Big Brother” — the online persona of former tech entrepreneur Jeffrey Huang — has purchased a total of 73.4 ETH of Pepe over the past four days. With Ether worth about $137,000, Pepe’s average purchase price was $0.000002082, about 3% below its current trading price.
Other meme coins, such as Dogecoin
Governor and similar dog-themed Shiba Inu SHIBs $0.000009
Having already leveraged their material success to build more applications and use cases for their respective tokens, Pepe seems to be experimenting with the idea of providing value.
Pepe’s anonymous development team explicitly stated that the token is “completely useless,” and this humor alone is enough to send investors “ape” in. The official website of the Frog Theme Token has a closing disclaimer describing the token in the following way:
"$PEPE is a meme coin with no intrinsic value or expectation of financial return. No formal team or roadmap. The coin is completely useless and is for entertainment purposes only."
C3 Tip: The views, thoughts and opinions expressed here are the author's own. This article does not contain investment advice or recommendations. Every investment and transaction involves risk. There are three levels of investment: see, understand, and hold. There are also three levels of entrepreneurship: think, do, and make it. Each level seems to be not much different in words, but in fact, there is a huge difference. Each level can eliminate more than 90% of people.
