Pepe Coin (PEPE), a memecoin launched in mid-April, has quickly emerged as one of the sensations in the cryptocurrency industry. Its price has skyrocketed by a staggering 638% for the past week, whereas the gains for the past 24 hours alone reached 90%. The asset’s market capitalization has also skyrocketed to almost $700 million.
Some possible reasons behind the substantial rise could be the overall positive condition of the market following the Fed’s latest interest rate hike or the fact that whales have exchanged assets for PEPE. Last but not least, the popular rapper Soulja Boy also interacted with the memecoin on Twitter.
The Market Turned Green
For starters, the impressive price increase of PEPE could be partially driven by the current positive condition of the cryptocurrency market. Bitcoin and most of the altcoins headed north shortly after the Federal Reserve announced another increase in interest rates by 25 basis points.
While the policy has caused price swings in the opposite way on previous occasions, it was somewhat different this time, as many economists expect this to be the final rate hike due to fears of an upcoming recession. Gregory Daco – Chief Economist at EY-Parthenon – said:
“I don’t think the inflation battle is over, but we are in a situation where we’re seeing gradual disinflation, and we’re also in an environment where interest rates are high and elevated and therefore should be a constraining business activity, which should lead to further disinflation in coming months.”
Still, PEPE’s gains for the past 24 hours are much more significant than those marked by BTC, ETH, BNB, and other larger-cap digital currencies, meaning more factors could be behind the price surge.
The Whales’ Activity
The rapid price increase of the now-trending token seems to have caught the eye of some crypto whales. According to the blockchain analytics platform Lookonchain, one such holder swapped almost all his assets for PEPE.
Specifically, he exchanged $590,000 worth of WBTC, $90,000 worth of CULT, $235,000 worth of UNI, and $37,000 worth of ETH to get 1.72T PEPE. The platform claimed the investor had made a paper profit of well over $1 million.
We noticed a whale exchanged almost all assets for $PEPE.
The whale exchanged 20.62 $WBTC($590K), 17B $CULT($90K), 44,194 $UNI($235K) and 19.96
