Popular memecoin PEPE is currently surging as it attempts to drive a market recovery. After a mixed week, the meme season’s hottest coin was no exception, with its market cap falling 46.1% during the period.

The past week has been quite bearish for the market as a whole, as the total cryptocurrency market cap has dropped by $64 billion, now valued at $1.170 trillion. Market leader Bitcoin did share most of the headlines with PEPE, as its market price plunged nearly 9% to below $27,000 for the first time since March.

While Wednesday’s CPI announcement did provide some boost to the primary cryptocurrency, it could not match the momentum of the market’s bears as Bitcoin is currently trading around $26,815. However, PEPE, on the other hand, seems to have found support and is back on a bullish path.

PEPE rose 28%, becoming the biggest daily gainer

According to Coingecko, PEPE has surged 28% in the past 24 hours, making it the largest market gainer in this period. After a steady decline throughout the week, the recent price increase has come as a relief to PEPE investors who thought the meme token was on the decline.

While there is no guarantee that PEPE will achieve stunning market performance again, its resilience may set it apart from most short-lived memecoins, such as the famous Dogecoin (DOGE) and Shiba Inu (SHIB) tokens.

Overall, PEPE remains the best performing token currently, up more than 405% in the past 14 days and more than 2,331% since its launch on April 17. During this period, the meme token has also made great strides in the industry with listings on more than 30 exchanges, including Binance, Huobi, OKX, KuCoin, and more.

At the time of writing, PEPE is trading at around $0.0000158, up 2% in the past hour. The token’s daily trading volume has also increased by 151.92%, valued at $934.45 million. However, PEPE is still 62% below its all-time value of $0.00000431 reached seven days ago.

Meme Token Criticism Continues

Amid the massive traction associated with meme season, criticism of these meme-inspired cryptocurrencies has not diminished. In one of the latest trending topics, Benjamin Cowen, a popular cryptocurrency analyst with over 700,000 Twitter followers, tweeted that memecoins exist only to “make founders rich.”

He further called the “strong community” narrative “garbage,” noting that most meme coins are launched by the same people “just pumping and dumping until it’s no longer profitable.”

While they may be very capable of generating huge profits, memecoins seem to be constantly criticized for their lack of utility. These tokens are based on internet memes and are driven solely by user communities and celebrity participation.

As a result, most memecoins are short-lived and “destined” to pump, crash, and burn, although there are only rare exceptions.