Pepe’s Sudden Drop Leaves Whale 500k in the Red

Only days after reaching an all-time high on May 6, the price of new memecoin Pepe (PEPE) has dropped more than 42%, leaving at least one investor with hundreds of thousands in paper losses. 

On May 5, one crypto “whale” paid 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’s PEPE holdings are now estimated to be worth only $2.4 million, representing a $600,000 unrealized loss.

Despite the recent price drop, Pepe still has a market capitalization of just over $1 billion, ranking it 45th in overall valuation. Pepe has garnered widespread attention since its inception on April 14, having seen over $636 million in trading volume in the last 24 hours and burning more than 5,000 ETH in related gas fees via Uniswap trading as of May 5.

While the memecoin’s price has been extremely volatile, the number of individual holders has steadily increased over the last three weeks. At the time of publication, there were 144,534 individual token holders, according to Dune Analytics data.

Following an enormous spike in Bitcoin activity involving BRC-20-related transactions, the emergence of memecoin mania has also caused fees on the Bitcoin to $28,363 network to surge to their highest levels in the last two years.

Since the creation of the most well-known meme-based cryptocurrency, Dogecoin $0.08, in 2013, memecoins have played a role in the cryptocurrency industry. It is worth noting that, due to the lack of fundamentals, investing in memecoins can be a precarious trading strategy, with vast sums of wealth being made and obliterated in equal measure.