Whales Start Taking Profits, PEPE Loses Nearly $200 Million in Market Cap

PEPE’s market cap once hit $582 million but has since dropped to $397 million as of May 3rd.

While DOGE and other dog-themed coins like SHIB and FLOKI dominated the previous memecoin season, Pepe the Frog (PEPE) has recently surged with impressive growth, becoming the third-largest memecoin by market cap and pushing BABYDOGE and FLOKI down a notch.

PEPE Becomes the Third-Largest Memecoin in the Market
Source: CoinGecko

With PEPE's remarkable rise in a short time, the community had high hopes for PEPE to soon join the ranks of billion-dollar memecoins alongside Dogecoin (DOGE) and Shiba Inu (SHIB).

However, according to Xin Yi, an analyst at Nansen, PEPE's market cap decline is attributed to whales taking profits. Yi shared with The Block:

“Many people bought PEPE early on, and the token price surged rapidly. Therefore, when they take profits, it causes significant market fluctuations due to the community’s tendency to follow whale trades. Additionally, the current liquidity is quite small compared to the market cap.”

Yi also pointed out an example where a whale sold $2.2 million worth of PEPE but received only $650,000 in ETH due to severe slippage. In the past 24 hours, other whale addresses have also begun to offload over $1 million in PEPE.

Inspired by a popular meme in the crypto Twitter community featuring the green frog Pepe, PEPE experienced a staggering 21,000% increase and recorded a trading volume of $30 million within just three days of its launch.

As of this writing, PEPE remains in the top 100 by market cap but has yet to regain its peak performance, trading around $0.00000118, up more than 17% from 24 hours prior.

Current Market Cap of PEPE: $492.7 Million
Source: CoinGecko