Pepecoin Doubles to $500M Market Cap as Memecoin Fever Steals Bitcoin's ETF Thunder
More than 155,000 wallets now hold the popular memecoin.
The hype rapidly wore off as the market cap slipped to $244 million earlier this month, but it now appears to have found a way out of the doldrums with a significant uptick in trading volume and on-chain activity.
![Pepecoin (CoinDesk data)](https://www.coindesk.com/resizer/XfMVdAMqwiiJSUBGoFY5R3EL0DM=/560x405/filters:quality(80):format(jpg)/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/coindesk/FRGZ7COR6NHUBB2KWHHHKNBFRA.png)
On Wednesday, a post on pepe's X page revealed that more than 155,000 individual wallets were holding pepe, including all token bridges to Arbitrum and BSC. Trading volume reached $423 million over the past 24 hours, a 22% rise from the previous day, according to CoinMarketCap.
The recent gain can be attributed to a $5.5 million token burn that took place on Tuesday, which alleviated fears of a rogue developer potentially selling tokens on the open market.
Pepe wasn't the only memecoin to experience upside – dogecoin and shiba inu both enjoyed notable rallies Thursday as traders began to trade more speculative assets.
The sector's positive performance comes after bitcoin, the world's largest cryptocurrency, surged to a 16-month high of $35,000 alongside growing optimism that a spot ETF will soon win approval in the U.S.