Crypto Analysis of Pepecoin (PEPE)

The memecoin trend is back in vogue after the crypto Pepecoin (PEPE) reached a market cap of $500 million within days of its launch.

Many frog-shaped NFTs were created in the wake of PEPE’s success, which also inspired the creation of fungible tokens on the bitcoin blockchain.

Some believe that PEPE could overtake SHIB in the coming months as the most popular crypto-meme in the community, as well as in terms of market capitalization.

Let us take a step back and calmly analyse the birth of PEPE and its rapid success, trying to understand if there really is a future for this crypto.

What is Pepecoin (PEPE) and how was it born?

Pepecoin (PEPE) is a new memecoin that was launched on the 15th of April 2023 and immediately won the sympathy of the crypto community.

The token is inspired by “Pepe The Frog”, a character created by cartoonist Matt Furie, who first appeared in the comic strip Boy’s Club in 2005.

Over the years, Pepe the Frog has become a cult meme, spreading on Myspace and the various blogs and social media sites that have sprung up with Web 2.0.

The frog with a human body has also been used in the political arena for some pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong against the extradition bill.

More recently, the meme has entered the Web 3.0 world with the Pepecoin (PEPE) cryptocurrency and the new NFT collections inspired by the frog in different moods.

In particular, the PEPE cryptocurrency, an ERC-20 token on the Ethereum blockchain, reached an extraordinary level of hype, attracting a lot of speculative activity that put it in the top 100 of the world’s most capitalised cryptocurrencies.

This is a staggering achievement, the result of brilliant marketing and a totally unexpected appreciation of the crypto community. 

Indeed, the trend in memecoin was very strong during the bull run of 2021, but faded with the onset of the bear market and the continuation of a weak speculative market.

With the advent of PEPE, however, spirits were rekindled, leading many to describe the historical period as a “return to the bull market” and the trend of trading meme-based cryptos.

The founders of the (anonymous) crypto presented the project as a response to the number of memecoins created in the wake of Doge and Shiba, writing on the main page of the website: 

“$pepe:the most memorable memcoin ever.Dogs have had their day, it’s time for Pepe to take over.”

$PEPE has a maximum supply of 420,690,000,000 tokens, of which 93.1 percent has been sent to the liquidity pool, while the remaining 6.9 percent has been allocated to a multi-signature wallet that will be used for future listings on CEX.

The team has publicly clarified that the crypto has no direct association with Matt Furie and that there is no intrinsic value and therefore no expectation of financial return.

There are no utilities for the token, only entertainment for the community.

Pepecoin (PEPE) crypto: ‘Pepe the Frog’ meme inspires many NFTs and BRC-20s on bitcoin

The surge in the price of the Pepecoin (PEPE) cryptocurrency has not only led to increased trading volumes on the DEX and the exchanges where it is listed, but has also drawn attention to the NFT side and the recent success of the BRC-20 standard.

In particular, two NFT collections inspired by PEPE have been very successful in terms of sales on OpenSea.

The collections are known as “Pepe Editions by Matt Furie” and “RarePepe by Matt Furie” and enjoy significantly higher volumes and floor prices than other respectable collections on the market.

In fact, even Matt Furie’s main NFT collection, “Hedz by Matt Furie”, the only one truly associated with the cartoonist, has benefited from the success of the PEPE crypto, as these non-fungible tokens have seen their floor price and the number of purchases/sales on the market increase.

Other collections inspired by the frog with different moods are likely to appear in the coming days, including fraudulent or non-fungible tokens.

As for the Bitcoin blockchain, which lacks the ability to allow the creation of smart contracts on the network, many PEPE-inspired fungible tokens have recently appeared under the BRC-20 standard.

The latter allows the creation of tokens under the Bitcoin blockchain, bypassing the problem of smart contracts.

Among the many tokens that have been created, many have been created under the name of famous memecoins, such as PEPE, MEME, SHIB, ELON, all under BRC-20.

These are primitive versions of cryptocurrencies, as the technology has only been around for 2 months. It is not possible to buy these tokens individually, but rather in ‘groups’, based on how many have been minted (or rather inscribed) on individual satoshi.

This trend has caused bitcoin fees to rise dramatically, given the high demand for the Ordinals protocol to create NFTs and fungible BRC-20 tokens, and given the hype that these meme-inspired tokens have generated.

PEPE vs. SHIB: a look at volumes

On its first day of trading on the major exchange OKX, the crypto Pepecoin (PEPE) achieved higher trading volumes than those generated by Shib on other markets.

Specifically, on the first day of trading, i.e. 1 May 2023, OKX saw a trading volume of around $75 million for the PEPE-USDT pair, while on Binance the volume for the SHIB-USDT pair was around $23.5 million.

Of course, this in itself means nothing and does not imply that this situation will continue in the future, but it is interesting to compare the two main markets for the respective cryptocurrencies.

There is also the fact that on the day of its listing on OKX, the PEPE crypto rose by around 100%, attracting more capital and speculative activity. In any case, this is an indicator that PEPE’s volumes, albeit for one day, were greater than those of SHIB, which is much more capitalised than the young frog.

This should give us pause to reflect on how dynamic the world of memecoins is, and to be ready to change course for new trends and new memes to jump on.

We cannot know if PEPE will replace SHIB, or even better, the most popular crypto-meme on the market, DOGE.

What we can understand, however, is that what happened on the 1st of May is not an ordinary event, but a situation that could potentially change the current domain scenarios.

However, let us be careful not to forget a basic concept: ALL memecoins have no intrinsic value, and consistent exposure to these socio-financial experiments could seriously jeopardise the value of your portfolio.

It cannot be ruled out that the memecoin phenomenon will continue to emerge in the future and be appreciated, at least speculatively, by investors, but we must be aware that these projects could fail at any moment and that the trust placed in them so far could vanish into thin air if only something more interesting and attractive from a pure profit point of view were to emerge.

Be on your guard, traders, and do your research.