Published: May 3rd, 2023
Launched just a fortnight ago, the Pepe (PEPE) meme coin has entered (at least for a while) the crypto market top 100, with a market capitalization pushing past USD 500 million.
The token leapt 110 per cent between Monday 1st May and Tuesday 2nd May and was up 300 per cent over the seven days since its public launch, according to figures from CoinGecko.
PEPE is an Ethereum EC-20 token with 420 trillion units in circulation. It joins a growing list of so-called meme coins like Dogecoin (DOGE), which use pop culture references to create a brand identity.
‘Pepe The Frog’ is an internet avatar popular in alt-right or ‘dissident’ political circles. A number of Pepe NFTs and tokens have come to market in recent years, however PEPE has managed to capture market attention in ways that others have not.
One investor used a USD 250 PEPE position to gain more than USD 1 million in just a few days. They purchased the token in mid-April by exchanging 0.125 ETH for 5.8 trillion PEPE tokens.
The investment mushroomed into a cool million as PEPE surged by 40,000 per cent in four days. CoinGecko says the wallet still holds 3.9 trillion coins, at a value of just above USD 5.2 million.
The coin started trading on 15th April 15 at USD 0.000000001. At time of writing, it was trading at USD 0.00000137.
PEPE’s meteoric rise happened alongside a rise in related Google searches.
Between April 8 and April 16, Google Trends scored searches for “pepecoin” at 100, up from a score of just three when the period began. The metric reflects the popularity of a keyword in a given time scale. Scores can range from 0 to 100, with 100 representing the peak popularity for a particular keyword search.
PEPE’s listing on major cryptocurrency exchanges like Huobi and MEXC will also have helped move its price.
Pepe’s backers will be hoping to repeat the success of meme-coin OG Dogecoin (DOGE), though without that coin’s history of capricious, celebrity-led ups and downs.
After a long period of positive gains, DOGE started fetching less in March 2023, dropping in value by ten per cent over a seven-day period to touch a two-month low of USD 0.074.
Data from CoinGecko showed the world’s favourite meme-coin steadily faltering in price, sinking to levels last seen in January, when the broader crypto market began to stir. The rising tide eventually took DOGE to USD 0.097 at the start of February.
After that high water mark, however, DOGE has mainly disappointed, with the exception of a brief mid-February spike when its price rose more than 10 per cent, moving from USD 0.079 to above USD 0.089.
As with so many DOGE events, price action was driven by comment from Tesla CEO Elon Musk, in this case after a tweet claiming he was talking to media-mogul Rupert Murdoch about the coin.
Musk followed up the tweet with a photo of a Shiba Inu dog, Dogecoin’s avatar in the crypto community, sitting at a desk inside Twitter’s offices.
Musk has consistently expressed interest in DOGE and often touts its utility as both an asset and form of payment. When he does, Dogecoin usually experiences a price rise, but markets may now be less reactive than in the past. His Dogecoin posts in February had only a minor impact and failed to halt its slide.
Musk may have also cast a pall over DOGE when he told social media followers last week that he was shifting his attention away from crypto to focus on investments in artificial intelligence.
‘I used to be all about crypto, but then I caught the AI bug,’ he tweeted. Dogecoin’s price crashed within minutes.
In a parallel development, Morgan Creek Capital Management CEO Marc Yusko told Bloomberg that that meme coins like Dogecoin are essentially 'worthless’.
But there’s life in DOGE yet. Regardless of the recent slump, Dogecoin managed to swap rankings with Polygon (MATIC) on Tuesday to become the ninth-largest crypto by market cap.
This all marks a big change from February 2023, when Twitter’s long-mooted move into the payments space inched another step closer and DOGE spiked as a result.
Twitter CEO Musk told journalists that his team of engineers was working on a payments product that will integrate crypto alongside fiat currencies.
On the back of the comments, Dogecoin saw its price spike from USD 0.08 to USD 0.09.
The meme-coin has often been buoyed in the past by Musk and crypto-related announcements about his companies, posting gains whenever Musk’s star appears to be rising and losses when Musk (or his businesses) seem to be struggling.
Since acquiring the social media network after a long takeover battle last year, Musk has been looking at ways to re-design Twitter as a platform for social payments. He registered the company as a payments business in December 2022 and is a ‘Coins’ feature is now under development that could allow users to pay for added services with fiat currencies, then get virtual Coins in return.
The coins would allow users to send tips or awards to other users for their content, similar in theory to awards systems used by Reddit and OnlyFans. Users will be able to buy Twitter Coins using the Stripe online payment platform.
Bloomberg said that crypto payments on Twitter were understood to be coming at a later date, once fiat payments hac been successfully integrated.
Plans for crypto payments pre-date Musk’s interest in the social media network and have been in the dev pipeline for some time. Despite its crypto engineering lead departing when Musk arrived as CEO, Twitter now offers verification via NFT as one of the subscription benefits for its Twitter Blue programme.
Users can also use Bitcoin to tip creators they like using the Strike (not to be confused with Stripe) platform. Twitter users who enable the monetization feature can also share their BTC and ETH wallet addresses in order to receive tips.