Five days ago the meme crypto Pepe was born.
It landed on the crypto markets on 17 April, and since then it has posted an incredible +1,120% in three days.
It is worth mentioning that the majority of PEPE’s trading volumes are happening on Uniswap, where in the last 24 hours it has collectively touched $140 million.
Indeed, on Uniswap v2 in the last 24 hours it turns out to be by far the token with the highest trading volumes, while on Uniswap v3 it is outperformed by WETH’s nearly 600 million. Despite this, on Uniswap v3 yesterday it ranked fourth in terms of trading volume, behind precisely WETH, USDC and WBTC.
Summary
The boom of the meme crypto PEPE
These resounding numbers yesterday are probably the consequence of the boom in the first two days of listing.
Actually on 17 April its price had dropped, although the next day saw a surge.
In fact, on 18 April it posted +300% in a single day, which then triggered yesterday’s further boom.
The absolute high price for now was touched tonight, but at a level not much higher than yesterday’s high. So it is possible that the bulk of the boom has already been there, between 18 and 19 April.
The memecoin, just five days after its launch, appears to already have more than 23,000 holders, and a market capitalization of more than $140 million.
What is the new meme crypto Pepe
PEPE is a token on Ethereum that is inspired by a famous meme.
It is a memecoin that would like to retrace the footsteps of Shiba Inu, and other similar memecoins, partly because the team that created it believes that Inu memecoins have had their day by now.
Pepe is a well-known and recognizable meme, and the goal of the team behind the PEPE token project is to make it the king of memecoins.
In addition, the co-founder of Apecoin is promoting this new memecoin a lot on Twitter, and this contributes to its momentary success.
It is worth noting that Shiba Inu has a market capitalization of $6 billion, and at its peak it even exceeded $43.5 billion. Before the 2021 bull run, it had a capitalization approximating zero, with the first boom pushing it to $14 billion in less than a week.
For now, it does not appear that PEPE is replicating those results.
The memecoin market
Memecoins are usually thought of as shitcoins.
That is, they are tokens that base their value only on the community of their holders.
The problem is that those who hold memecoins usually do so primarily for “fashion,” that is, following what the masses do. Because of this they move from one memecoin to another, and when interest in one fades, its price tends to plummet.
The perfect example is Shiba Inu.
After the incredible boom in early May 2021, when it went from virtually zero to $14.5 billion in total theoretical value in one week, it had only one other good moment, in October of the same year.
After that, its value practically always fell, partly because $43.5 billion capitalization for a token that is only a memecoin is just too much.
It currently capitalizes $6.4 billion, which is less than half of what it came to capitalize after the first boom in May 2021 in a single week of initial madness.
Dogecoin’s path
The case is a little different for Dogecoin, both because it is not a token but a real cryptocurrency, and because it has been around for a very long time now (ten years), and because it is the world’s first memecoin and is still the most important. But mostly because it was pushed by Elon Musk himself and quite overtly.
For example, Musk himself has never explicitly endorsed Shiba Inu and Floki, despite the fact that they are memecoins created precisely to take advantage of his Twitter rants, so inevitably the success of these two tokens is only passing.
At any rate, even Dogecoin itself in 2021 had in some ways a similar path to Shiba Inu.
Before the 2021 bull run, it capitalized less than a billion, while by early February 2021 it had already risen to 9 billion. It peaked in early May, around the same time as SHIB, at a stratospheric level of more than $80 billion.
Since then it has done nothing but lose throughout 2022, with a tentative rebound in 2023. As of today, for example, it capitalizes only $12.7 billion, which is less than what SHiba Inu came to capitalize in one week during its first boom in May 2021.
