There is the soccer player Pepe, the guitarist Pepe, and the racing driver Pepe. And now there’s Pepe, the new frog-themed cryptocurrency.
The coin, which is based on an internet meme, has taken the token market by storm in the month since its launch. Trading was frantic, pushing Pepe’s market value to nearly $2 billion at one point, though that has since fallen by more than half.
Only in the world of cryptocurrencies can a currency that pays homage to a cartoon frog catch the attention of market participants – and perhaps even Elon Musk. It is a symbol of the hype that continues to fuel the cryptocurrency markets, fueled by the actions of a few dominant players and influenced by the price of Bitcoin.
The new memecoin — a subclass of “altcoin,” which refers to tokens other than Bitcoin and Ether — is the latest to catch the attention of the crypto crowd. It joins the more popular Dogecoin, from 2013, which refers to a “doge” meme involving a Shiba Inu dog. Dogecoin is now the eighth largest digital asset by market cap and has inspired countless spin-offs, including
shiba inu,
It is the 15th largest cryptocurrency.
Bibi is growing faster than his older peers. It only took 22 days for the toad coin to have the number of registered holders on the blockchain surpass 100,000, according to crypto research group Messari. The same growth took 90 days for the Shiba Inu.
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Like the dog-themed coins, Pepe seems to have caught Tesla’s attention
‘s
(Stock ticker: TSLA) Musk, who said he owns Dogecoin and has played with it for years in references on Twitter and on TV. Pepe’s prices skyrocketed by nearly 50% in one volatile boom that appeared immediately After Musk tweeted the Pepe the Frog memealthough he does not explicitly mention the symbol.
“Pepe’s meteoric rise is unlike anything we’ve seen in crypto history,” Messari analyst Chase Devens wrote in a note earlier in May. Here’s a look at the currency’s brief past, how it traded, and what could happen to the price.
What is BabyCoin? Where did the meme come from?
Pepe was launched in mid-April by a team of anonymous developers. The group’s website is full of online jokes, including the phrase “make memecoins cool again” and details on how they saved 420,690,000,000,000 tokens.
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“Pepe is a meme currency that has no intrinsic value or expectation of financial return,” say the developers. “There is no official team or roadmap. The currency is completely useless and for entertainment purposes only.”
The token refers to the Internet meme Pepe the Frog, which itself is based on a character from the 2005 comic by cartoonist Matt Furie. As a meme, Pepe can appear in a variety of ways—the frog often has different facial expressions and is edited into different contexts—but in its simplest form, it appears to represent smugness.
Meme Baby has been co-opted by extremist Internet-based groups, earning it a reputation as a cultural fickle. The Anti-Defamation League has classified the meme as a hate symbol, noting that the character did not initially have racist connotations and that many of the uses are still not bigoted.
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Can you buy Babycoin? where?
Pepe is now available on a number of major cryptocurrency exchanges. This includes Binance, the world’s largest venue for trading digital assets, as well as platforms including OKX, Kraken, KuCoin, and decentralized exchange UniSwap.
US-based broker Coinbase (COIN) does not list Pepe on a centralized exchange, but Pepe can be purchased with Ether tokens through Coinbase Wallet, making it easier for users to exchange tokens on a decentralized basis.
Investors should note that digital asset trading and most cryptocurrency exchanges are still not regulated in the United States
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How did Pepe price perform?
Pepe’s price rose as much as 6,300% between April 18 and its peak on May 5, after it was listed on a number of major exchanges.
Prior to its listing on OKX, Pepe had a market capitalization of around $275 million, according to crypto data provider CoinGecko. In a jump after its listing on Binance, its market capitalization peaked at $1.7 billion, with its trading volumes in the first week of May routinely dwarfing those of Dogecoin or Shiba Inu. Pepe’s market value was hovering near $650 million as of Wednesday.
Bibi’s future predictions?
For those outside of cryptocurrencies, Pepe may represent another example of why digital assets are worthless: they have no intrinsic value and show dangerous levels of volatility.
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For those within the industry, there is logic in Pepe’s trading. The key is to get ahead of the hype and fear of missing out that new coins can generate as interest grows. This dynamic, along with signs that influential market participants known as crypto “whales,” suggest that the frenzy around Bibi may be far from over.
“Arguably the most important driver of Pepe’s growth is the fact that crypto participants are now aware of how fast memecoins can grow,” said Devens, of Messari. “It pays to be early, and this self-reinforcing power is attracting more buyers as the meme grows in popularity.”
This popularity only grows when tokens like Pepe get listed on cryptocurrency exchanges. The first major factor driving up the price of the toad cryptocurrency was its listing on OKX on May 1, which Binance quickly reversed on May 5. While exchanges do not endorse coins, Binance Pepe has kept it in its “innovation zone” for smaller and often more volatile coins – listings can act as tacit endorsements and transfer billions of dollars of liquidity into tokens.
How does Pepe affect Bitcoin?
The broader dynamics of the cryptocurrency markets play a role in determining memecoin prices. Trends in Bitcoin, the largest coin, tend to drive prices for all cryptocurrencies, which has worked out well for Pepe.
Bitcoin is up about two-thirds this year so far, aided by mounting expectations that the Federal Reserve is done raising interest rates to fight inflation. Memecoins also took off in a wave that could either indicate bull market strength or froth before correcting.
“When you pump meme coins, it often tells us where we are in the crypto cycle,” Anthony Trenchev, co-founder and managing partner at crypto lender Nexo, said in a research note shortly after Pepe began its rally.
Trenchev referred to the gains made by the Squid token – referring to the popular Netflix series Squid game—in late 2021, when the token surged more than 200,000%. In hindsight, this was a sign that the cryptocurrency markets had outgrown it.
“Time will tell if the appearance of Pepe-the-Frog heralds the beginning of a new cryptocurrency summer or something more bleak,” Trenchev wrote.
Write to Jack Denton at [email protected]
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