PEPE's Price Decline
Pepe (PEPE) faced a sharp downfall on Friday morning as millions of dollars' worth of the cryptocurrency were swiftly transferred from the project team's wallet to various exchanges.
This sudden move caused PEPE to plummet by over 14% overnight. According to CoinMarketCap’s data, the token is down 20.3% over the past week.
As a result of this transfer, the token's market value suffered, falling from $444 million at one point to a low of $321.82 million, a loss of over $100 million. The size of these multi-million dollar transactions immediately spread across Crypto Twitter, escalating the sense of uncertainty within the community.
Launched in April this year, the memecoin managed to surpass expectations by going on an explosive rally in May to reach $1.65B in market capitalization at its all-time high. Leveraging internet memes and popular culture references, PEPE fueled a “memecoin season” with its rally.
The transfer of 16.045 trillion PEPE tokens, or $16.85 million, from the project's multi-signature Ethereum address to four well-known exchanges—Binance, OKX, KuCoin, and Bybit—is what led to PEPE's price decline.
The swiftness of the action and the lack of communication from the project's official Twitter account prompted questions, which worried both analysts and holders. Notably, the multi-signature wallet's security mechanisms were also changed, lowering the amount of signatures needed for transactions.
At the time of writing, PEPE's market capitalization stands at $350.69 million, down almost 80% from its all-time highs.