By
Chimamanda U. Martha
June 17th, 2024
Pepe price has outshined dog-themed meme coins in the recent past but early investors have been spotted on a selling spree.
The meme coin industry, led by frog-themed Pepe (PEPE), has grown to a $62.5 billion sector in the recent past. The high demand for meme coins in the ongoing crypto bull cycle is heavily influenced by the significant success of Dogecoin (DOGE) since its inception.
As Coinspeaker previously reported, institutional investors, as shown by the rise of VanEck’s MarketVector meme coin index, have shown great interest in meme coins to maximize gains.
The Rise of Pepe (PEPE) Price
After a floppy beginning that involved internal wrangles between the developers, Pepe meme coin has gained significant bullish momentum in the recent past. According to the latest market data, Pepe price surged over 25 percent in the last 24 hours to reach a new all-time high (ATH) of around $0.0000142.
As a result, the frog-themed meme coin surpassed Solana-based dogwifhat (WIF) as the third most valuable meme coin by market capitalization. Notably, Pepe had a total market cap of about $5.77 billion and a daily average traded volume of around $3 billion, the highest in the meme coin industry.
Pepe price has closely followed the recent Ethereum (ETH) price breakout, which signaled heightened crypto cash rotation from Bitcoin to altcoins. Furthermore, the notable reversal in the ETH/BTC pair and Bitcoin dominance has accelerated the ongoing altcoin recovery.
The notable adoption of Pepe meme coin is heavily influenced by its deep liquidity of nearly $60 million in Wrapped Ether (WETH).
According to on-chain data provided by Etherscan, Pepe meme coin has over 223k holders, who have facilitated around 2 million transfers.
The largest Pepe holders are centralized exchanges led by Binance, OKX, Bybit, Crypto.com, and Kraken, among others. As of this report, the Pepe community has burned around 1.2 percent of the total supply, worth about $70 million.
Boiling Trouble
Amid the notable hype in Pepe meme coin, on-chain data analysts led by those from Lookonchain have identified early investors dumping into the secondary market. For instance, an early Pepe investor deposited 201 billion PEPE units, worth around $2.83 million, to the Bybit crypto exchange.
Another early Pepe investor, who turned around $462 to more than $3.4 million, deposited over 282 billion Pepe units to Binance earlier on Wednesday. Additionally, BlockTower Capital transferred 202 billion Pepe to Cumberland for sale after making a profit of around 26 percent.
Meanwhile, a giant crypto whale purchased over 592 billion Pepe units, worth around $8 million on Wednesday, thus largely absorbing the short sellers.
Heightened whale activity in the Pepe ecosystem could trigger a fresh bull run in the coming weeks. The altcoin bull run will be rejuvenated if the US SEC approves the spot Ether ETFs tomorrow.