Crypto Whale Loses $500K+ Speculating on Pepe Memecoin

Following its Friday launch on Binance, the PEPE memecoin dropped 38% after three days, resulting in steep losses for speculators.

Pepe Coin (PEPE), the memecoin launched on April 15, has experienced a significant price drop recently, losing 38% of its value in just a few days.

PEPE was recently listed on Binance on May 5, 2023, peaking at $0.00000420. It boasted a $1 billion market cap when the token price rose 67% on Saturday after its listing on Binance. However, PEPE’s price fell from around $0.00000420 on May 5 to $0.00000259 on May 7. PEPE sits at $0.00000211 at the time of writing, according to data from CoinGecko. 

The Binance team noted, “PEPE has no token utility or value support mechanism. Also, there are signs that certain insiders or team members were able to buy 7% of the total token supply minutes after TGE [token generation event].” Memecoins usually have no real utility and operate on the virality of the meme itself. Those who are early investors and sellers could see large profits, while those mistiming these sales could result in huge losses. 

This was the case for one whale. This hopeful investor bought 962.3 billion PEPE for $2.46 million. At the time of the below tweet by data firm Lookonchain, the whale lost $541,000 and counting. 

A whale bought 962.3B $PEPE($2.46M currently) with 70 $WBTC ($2.07M) and 470 $ETH ($937K) in the past 2 days, with an average buying price of $0.000003122.

He has lost ~$541K at the current price!https://t.co/GDBdXcVyGt pic.twitter.com/7s1Ns90OOc

— Lookonchain (@lookonchain) May 7, 2023

With popular memecoin such as Dogecoin, the price was often indicative of the actions of Tesla CEO Elon Musk. For example, when Musk announced that Tesla was accepting DOGE as payment, the price shot up 35.7%. With the price based on nothing concrete, DOGE and other memecoins such as SHIB or PEPE are akin to gambling. Binance’s CEO Changpeng “CZ” Zhao followed up the sudden PEPE price breakout with some helpful trading advice:

Meme coins (and all crypto) are high risk!

Remember, no one is forcing you to buy them. DYOR and be responsible for your own actions. https://t.co/4GBHB3Llkx

— CZ 🔶 Binance (@cz_binance) May 5, 2023

With PEPE’s current price of $0.00000211, at the time of writing and a market cap of $874,128,193, PEPE still has a significant following and is expected to experience the usual high and lows normal for a “token [that] has no utility and it is created by an anonymous team,” according to the Binance report.