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PEPE Puts in New Highs, Here is Why the Meme Coin Outperformed DOGE and SHIB
- PEPE, the third-most popular memecoin, is up 44% over the past week.
- A mass-scale token burning, accounting for over 1% of the entire PEPE supply, is largely responsible for the gains.
- Dogecoin and Shiba Inu are up 13% and 6.5% respectively over the past 7 days, but have had an uninspiring 2023 overall.
Popular memecoin project PEPE has become one of few altcoins to outperform Bitcoin (BTC) over last week’s crypto rally, with the token up 44% over the past seven days. The digital currency is still worth just a fraction of a cent and 66% down on its all-time high, which it hit in May this year. The reason behind PEPE’s short-term gains is rather simple – the project developers relinquished total control over the token’s circulating supply.
Token Burning Behind PEPE Price Surge
Memecoins aren’t renowned for being particularly trustworthy and are often associated with pump-and-dump schemes – as witnessed in 2021 with the rise (and fall) of the Squid Game project. This is why some investors were trepidatious that PEPE’s ownership team owned over 10 trillion tokens (or 2.5% of the total supply). Concerns reached paramount earlier in the year when a bad actor from inside the PEPE development team stole millions of dollars worth of cryptocurrency.
As a response, the rejigged PEPE development group “burned” half of their tokens by sending them to a wallet address without an owner. Not only did this alleviate the concerns of some investors by better distributing power back to PEPE owners, but it also reduced more than 1% of the total token supply. These two factors resulted in an explosion of trading volume (up 205% over 24 hours) and price.
Are Investors Barking Mad?
Meanwhile, memecoin’s two top dogs…sorry… have enjoyed a fairly uneventful 2023. Dogecoin DOGE is up nearly 13% on the week but has pretty consistently lost value throughout the crypto winter. Shiba Inu (SHIBA) has had similarly unspectacular results, although the project is seeing a lot of development regardless of investors cooling off. The team behind Shiba continues to expand the memecoin’s ecosystem, with the staking mechanism and decentralised exchange becoming more and more refined.
Author
Ben Knight
Ben Knight is a writer and editor from Melbourne with a passion for all things music and finance. He enjoys turning complex topics – especially the technical details of cryptocurrency – into digestible bites that anybody can understand. He acquired his Master’s in Writing, Editing and Publishing from RMIT in 2019 and has run his own creative writing business ever since.
