Pepecoin surpassed the $1 billion market cap mark just three weeks after launching, but the coin has seen a 45% recoil over the past three days.
Frog-themed memecoin Pepe has taken the crypto space by storm over the past few weeks. Pepecoin launched on April 14 and broke into the top 100 cryptocurrencies within its first two weeks of trading.
By May 5, following its Binance listing, PEPE surpassed the $1 billion market cap – a dizzying feat for a new token that has ‘no intrinsic value‘.
PEPE mania has slowed a bit over the weekend and is down 45% from Friday, falling from $0.00000420 to $0.00000228. Its market cap has also slipped from $1.8 billion to $96 million.
Why has PEPE skyrocketed?
Pepecoin is a meme coin based on the Pepe the Frog meme. It’s an ERC-20 token with a supply of 420.69 trillion tokens. Its developers remain anonymous.
PEPE has no intrinsic value, and like most other meme coins, its value is mostly driven by internet hype.
The first ‘phase’ of the Pepe roadmap outlined on its website is to “get $PEPE Trending on twitter with our memetic power”.
Good to know
The word ‘meme’ long predates what we know as internet memes. ‘Memes’ are a widely used concept in biologist Richard Dawkins’ seminal book, The Selfish Gene. Memes are ideas, behaviors, or cultural elements that are transmitted from person to person through imitation or replication. ‘Going viral’ is memetic.
The official Pepe website confirms the ‘memetic’ value of Pepecoin, stating: “$PEPE is a meme coin with no intrinsic value or expectation of financial return. There is no formal team or roadmap. The coin is completely useless and for entertainment purposes only.”
Binance listed PEPE alongside a similar meme coin, FLOKI, on May 5, in its ‘Innovation Zone’. The Binance Innovation Zone is a trading zone that’s dedicated to highly-volatile, high-risk tokens.
In the listing note, the Binance stated: “PEPE has no token utility or value support mechanism. Also, there are signs that certain insiders or team members were able to buy 7% of the total token supply minutes after TGE. “
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