PEPE Whale Takes $540,000 Paper Loss in Two Days as Token Plunges Over 30%
PEPE, the latest meme coin sensation, has been on a tear, soaring roughly 400% in the past week as investors pour money into the token, hoping to make some returns. On Friday, the meme coin surged as high as $0.0000045 after being listed on Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange.
The price, however, faced a sharp pullback Saturday, plunging roughly 40% as some earlier investors, taking advantage of the week’s rally, booked profits. Following the price drop, various investors have been hit hard, with one whale losing just over half a million dollars.
On Sunday, May 2, on-chain analytics firm Santiment highlighted a whale who lost approximately $541,000 worth of PEPE after buying a substantial sum about two days ago. Reportedly, the anonymous entity purchased 962.3B $PEPE worth $2.46M along with 70 $WBTC worth $2.07M and 470 $ETH worth $937K. However, by noon on Sunday, his PEPE stash had taken a loss of approximately $541K.
PEPE was launched mid-last month as a meme coin, paying homage to the popular internet meme Pepe the Frog. Although its website mentions that the token has no intrinsic value or expectation of financial return, investors have been flocking to buy it, especially after some early investors made staggering profits.
In less than three weeks, the token has attracted a significant market cap of just over $1 billion and currently ranks 44th among the largest cryptocurrencies. Notably, Sentiment has been highlighting various whale purchases, with some buyers swapping meme coins such as Shiba Inu and DOGE for PEPE.
Meme coins have been gaining popularity in the cryptocurrency market recently, despite being absent for nearly a year following last year’s brutal winter. These tokens are created based on popular memes and have no real-world use cases. They are often created as a joke, but some, like Dogecoins and Shiba Inu, have gained significant traction and market value due to their enhanced use cases.
Notably, as PEPE has no formal team or roadmap and is purely for entertainment purposes only, it remains highly speculative and can lead to substantial losses within short periods, according to some experts.
“If all of a sudden people realize that PEPE has no value and it collapses, you’re going to wipe a billion dollars off this market in minutes. The sooner these things collapse the better because we don’t want it to create a greater market contagion,” crypto analyst Ran Neuner said.
With the recent loss incurred by the PEPE whale highlighting the highly volatile nature of meme coins and the risks involved in investing in them, investors must exercise caution and thoroughly research the token and its potential risks before investing.
At press time, PEPE was trading at $0.000002888, down 0.54% in the past 24 hours, according to CoinMarketCap data.
Source: Read Full Article