According to CoinMarketCap data, Pepe (PEPE) surged into the top twenty tokens by market capitalization earlier on Thursday after a “beta bet” narrative increased the token’s value by around 40% over the previous week.
The token with a frog motif was launched in April 2023 and, just a few weeks after being live, it shot to a $1 billion market valuation. Since then, it has established itself as a staple meme coin; on Thursday, its market capitalization reached $6 billion. As a result, pepe is now the largest meme coin launch of 2023 in a year that also saw the issuance of bonk (BONK), dogwifhat (WIF), and other coins.
Along with MOG, PEPE’s recent ascent has been fueled by its use as a leveraged wager on the expansion of the Ethereum ecosystem as traders await the U.S. approval of a spot ether ETF.
One trader at least has gone from a modest first purchase to great success. A crypto address that bought roughly $460 worth of the tokens right after launch made nearly $3.4 million in earnings this week, according to on-chain research by Lookonchain.
On April 15, 2023, the buyer paid 0.22 ETH for 324.9B PEPE. The tokens were deposited on Wednesday to the cryptocurrency exchange Binance, according to Lookonchain, where they were probably sold.
If the address was associated with the development team that released PEPE remains unknown. Nonetheless, automated bots are frequently used by meme currency traders, who generally buy tiny quantities of each token that is released into the market in the hopes of making a huge profit down the road.
It is anticipated by some traders that PEPE will eventually flip the dog-themed Shiba Inu (SHIB), which as of Thursday had a $14 billion market capitalization.
Over the past year, Pepe’s early purchases have created several billionaires. As reported, in the week following the token’s launch, a few connected wallets increased their initial investment of $1,200 to over $9 million, and another buyer made over $3 million from a $260 purchase.
