Frog-Inspired Memecoin PEPE, Seen as ‘ETH Beta,’ Climbs to All-Time High – Unchained

One whale has withdrawn about $13.6 million worth of PEPE from crypto exchange Binance since the fortunes of the ETH ETF approval reversed.

On the heels of heightened expectations that an ETH ETF will be approved this week, PEPE, the frog-inspired memecoin with roots tracing back to 4chan and Tumblr, has reached an all-time high in price, edging closer to a market cap of $6 billion. 

According to data from CoinGecko, PEPE has increased 3.2% in the past 24 hours and over 40% in the past seven days to rise to an all-time high of $0.00001454 before settling at $0.00001385. Its market cap currently stands at $5.79 billion, roughly 9% of the entire market cap of total memecoins.

Some traders view PEPE, which was first deployed in April 2023, as beta for ETH, which means that the frog-inspired memecoin is not just correlated with ETH but is also a leveraged play on ETH. For example, if ETH sees an increase in price, PEPE will also see a jump, but the latter will see a much larger uptick in its price movement. 

Starting on Wednesday, crypto analytics firm Lookonchain highlighted that one whale, crypto parlance for a wallet address holding large amounts of cryptocurrencies, withdrew from Binance about $5.4 million worth of PEPE eight hours ago and almost  $8.2 million of PEPE on Wednesday.

Investors transferring tokens off exchanges and into their wallet addresses is often a sign of longer-term “hodling,” since tokens on exchanges are more accessible for selling. 

Additionally, data from blockchain intelligence platform Nansen shows that wallets labeled as “smart money” have had net inflows of about $444,000 worth of PEPE in the past 24 hours. 

Nansen identifies a wallet address as “smart money,” if it has a historical onchain track record of profitability, which entails a variety of actions such as receiving a substantial amount of tokens across several airdrops or making more than $100,000 by being a liquidity provider on decentralized exchange Uniswap.

The fortunes of ETH, which traders had recently been complaining lacked a narrative, reversed dramatically on Monday when Bloomberg analysts tripled their odds that a spot ether ETF would be approved from 25% to 75%. ETH’s price shot up nearly 20% that day alone. In the days after, a flurry of ETH ETF applicants have been submitting updated filings to the SEC. A decision is expected later Thursday.  

Read More: Bits + Bips: Is US Politics Driving the ETH ETF Approval? 

PEPE’s positive price movement is a stark contrast compared with the total crypto market cap as well as the two largest memecoins, SHIB and DOGE. Over the past 24 hours, the total crypto market cap has declined 3.2%, while SHIB and DOGE have each fallen about 5%.