PEPE became the fastest growing ERC-20 token in the history of cryptocurrencies, reaching a market value of $1 billion and 107,000 holders in just 23 days.
Cryptocurrencies have a problem with limited use in everyday life, but memcoins such as PEPE have proven their ability to attract new users to the blockchain. PEPE is an ERC-20 token on the Ethereum network that has attracted a large number of holders in a short time and reached a market capitalization of $1 billion. To better understand memcoins, we can take a look at the history of development and hype of PEPE.
The Origins of PEPE
Memcoins originated in 2013 with the advent of Dogecoin (DOGE) and reached peak popularity during the bull market in 2021. DOGE became widely known and grew in value from $700 million capitalization to $88 billion in 5 months. After Dogecoin, the Shiba Inu token (SHIB) appeared, it grew in capitalization from less than $1 million to $42 billion in 10 months. These memecoins have no intrinsic value, but their association with viral internet memes has allowed them to become popular among everyday cryptocurrency users. Currently, PEPE is a new memecoin that is attracting market attention. His popularity stems from the character Pepe the Frog, created in a Boys Club cartoon by Matt Fourie in 2005. The original Pepe pictures and meme variants began spreading virally in the 2010s on internet platforms such as 4chan and Tumblr.
The PEPE token was released on April 14, with a total supply of 420.69 trillion tokens. 93.1% of this was deposited into the Uniswap liquidity pool, with the remaining 6.9% held in a wallet for future listing on centralized exchanges. The anonymous team that released PEPE took advantage of Pepe the Frog's Twitter fame. It can be said that this strategy was an unexpected success.
PEPE Growth Rates
PEPE quickly gained over 100,000 holders in 22 days, which is much faster than other meme tokens on Ethereum. For example, SHIB took 90 days to reach this mark, while YFI and YAM never reached this number. Dai, which grew more organically, took 225 days to reach 100,000 holders.
PEPE grew faster than SHIB due to the fact that Cryptocurrency participants are already familiar with the rise of memcoins at the beginning of 2021, and this fact is attracting more buyers. If we look at the average cost of ownership of each PEPE and SHIB holder, we find that PEPE shows similar growth dynamics to SHIB, but at a much faster pace.
The rapid addition of PEPE to centralized exchanges contributed to its popularity. It took PEPE just 6 days to list on the MEXC exchange. And 22 days of PEPE to list on Binance. Integration into centralized exchanges has simplified speculative trading and allowed large players to provide off-chain market-making services. Most PEPE trading now takes place on centralized exchanges instead of Uniswap.
Centralized exchanges such as Binance and Bybit provide futures on PEPE with 100x leverage, which resulted in futures trading volume exceeding spot trading volume. However, futures volume created greater volatility in PEPE. This PEPE price volatility over the weekend caused gas on Ethereum to reach new record levels.
These events in the Ethereum network brought benefits to ETH holders. Since The Merge in September 2022, the supply of ETH after April 14th has been declining at a rapid pace.
What will happen next for PEPE?
SHIB and DOGE faced a 90% correction after rising in 2021, but this does not mean that PEPE's ascent is over. PEPE's market capitalization is significantly smaller than that of SHIB and DOGE, and PEPE may still temporarily outperform them. Additionally, the number of daily active users on Uniswap on the Ethereum network is quickly approaching the all-time high set in May 2021. If interest in PEPE continues to grow, a new record for the number of daily users could be set.
Conclusion
PEPE's early successes attracted attention to new memecoins such as WOJAK, TURBO and AIDOGE. These stories of wealth from small investments make speculation more attractive to users. However, the appearance of a large number of scams and frantic growth are a sign of the final stage of the takeoff of the memcoin market, as has already happened in 2021.
