The Surprising Rise of PEPE

The surprisingly rapid rise of pepecoin (PEPE), a meme coin introduced just a few weeks ago and now valued at more than $1 billion, is creating huge fortunes for those who ignore the warnings that it’s a fad. Cryptocurrency alias dimethyltryptamine.eth spent $263 just three weeks ago to purchase trillions of PEPE tokens. They made a profit of $3.8 million with the tokens they managed to sell, and their remaining PEPEs amounted to about $9 million, according to data from blockchain research firm Arkham Intelligence. That’s almost 5,000,000% profit.

Launched in April, the meme coin had a staggering market cap of more than $1 billion on Friday, and was at times worth more than Arbitrum’s ARB, one of the most popular emerging tokens of 2023, according to CoinGecko. However, analysts have expressed concern about the heavy ownership of pepecoin, pointing to several cryptocurrencies that received a substantial amount of PEPE when the token was launched last month. Blockchain researcher Lookonchain exposed five accounts linked to a wallet owned by pepecexwallet.eth, and these accounts, which received direct funding from the token’s deployer contract, purchased 8.87 trillion PEPE after it was released for just $385.

Dimethyltryptamine.eth, which was not among the insider wallets by Lookonchain but was among the earliest buyers, purchased 5.907 trillion PEPE tokens for $263 in two transactions on April 14 using UniSwap, as Arkham shows. Cryptocurrency also paid $17 for gas fees. Since then, the crypto exchange has been gradually taking profits by sending small amounts multiple times to UniSwap and receiving ether (ETH) in return. According to Arkham data, last month the wallet sent $3.8 million of PEPE to UniSwap, of which $2.4 million was transferred in the last 24 hours, possibly for profit.