PEPE Coin Enters Market’s Top 100 Cryptocurrencies, Soaring 111% Overnight

A new meme coin is born.

Pepe (PEPE), launched just two weeks ago, has now entered the market’s top 100 largest cryptocurrencies, with a market capitalization of $582 million.

The PEPE token pumped 111% in the last 24 hours and is up 304% over the week, according to CoinGecko.

PEPE is an ERC-20 token with a supply of 420.69 trillion tokens, joining the ranks of so-called meme coins, or tokens based on internet memes and popular culture references.

While there have been several Pepe the Frog NFTs and tokens released over the years, the most recent PEPE token has been especially fortuitous in capturing the market’s attention.

One investor even managed to turn $250 in PEPE into $1.02 million in just a few days. They bought the token on April 15 swapping 0.125 Ethereum for 5.9 trillion PEPE tokens.

The bet then ballooned into a million dollars as PEPE pumped roughly 40,7900% in four days—the wallet continues to hold 3.9 trillion coins, worth just over $5.3 million.

The coin first began trading on April 15 at a price of around $0.000000001. The token was last trading at $0.00000137, per CoinGecko data.

What’s driving PEPE?

The meteoric rise of PEPE has occurred in lockstep with a similar rise in Google searches.

The Google Trend score for “pepecoin” surged from 3 to 100 from the week of April 9 to the week of April 16.

The score reflects the popularity of a keyword in Google Search in a given time period. The metric shifts between 0 to 100, with 100 representing the peak popularity for a particular keyword search.

Another factor potentially moving the price of PEPE coin is its listing on several cryptocurrency exchanges, including OKX, Huobi, Gate.io, and MEXC.

DeFi volumes for PEPE have also soared. Volumes around the token spiked from $2.99 million on April 15 in a Uniswap PEPE/WETH pool, to over around $240 million with multiple liquidity pools and centralized exchange listings.

Nansen’s Ethereum analytics dashboard shows that over 30 “smart money” wallets bought PEPE tokens worth around $1 million in the last week. The analytics firm tags very large and active traders in the “smart wallets” category.