The popular frog-themed meme coin Pepe (PEPE) – which shocked investors earlier this year with its over 100,000% rally – is now facing a real risk of falling back to its all-time lows.
Pepe has emerged as one of the worst-performing tokens in the last month, posting the most severe losses of any top-200 cryptocurrency in the past 30 days.
Pepe is not the only token showing bearish tendencies – major cryptocurrencies are seeing a correction after yesterday’s highly-anticipated FOMC meeting, with Bitcoin falling below the $27,000 price level.
The largest cryptocurrency depreciated by 2% daily, while major altcoins such as Solana, Litecoin and Avalanche saw more pronounced declines.
While the Federal Reserve met market expectations by pausing its interest rate hike, Fed chair Jerome Powell revealed that another hike would likely be appropriate.
In other meme coin news, new project Wall Street Memes (WSM) is creating hype and FOMO as it is set for its IEO next week.
Pepe Coin Price Crashes 40%, Falls Out of Top 100 Crypto Rankings
While the rest of the market is struggling with a worsening macroeconomic outlook, Pepe token is also facing a lack of investor confidence – the meme coin has been unable to regain buyers’ trust after last month’s alleged rug pull.
Pepe has been one of the top trending tokens on CoinMarketCap for all the wrong reasons. The token’s market capitalization – which was as high as $1.6 billion in May of this year – has fallen all the way down to $241 million. Pepe is now the 108th largest crypto asset according to CoinMarketCap and ranks 116th according to CoinGecko.
Pepe is now trading at $0.00000061, down 85% from its all-time high and 42% in the past 30 days. Investors continue to remain extremely pessimistic regarding any potential bounce-back as the token has plummeted another 1.4% in the past 24 hours.
Pepe coin’s performance is even more concerning when compared to other top meme tokens – while both Dogecoin and Shiba Inu have traded mostly sideways in the past week, Pepe has plunged over 9% in the same time span.
The current downward spiral started when its devs dumped $15.7 million worth of $PEPE holdings from its central multi-sig wallet.
To make matters worse, the number of signatures required to access the multi-sig wallet also changed from 5 to 2, which security experts called an unexplainable decision.
Whales and smart-money traders started selling their Pepe holdings, fearing a rug pull, which pushed the token into a free fall.
To control the disaster, the official Pepe Twitter account put out a statement, pinning the blame for the entire fiasco on “a few bad actors within the team”. The author claimed that the remaining tokens will be transferred to another safer wallet and will only be used on a need-to basis or will be burnt.
However, meme coin enthusiasts such as @EricCryptoman and @Pauly0x remained extremely sceptical of this response, while others like @CryptoKaleo vowed never to invest in the token again.
As if things were not bad enough, the same Twitter account revealed two weeks later that Pepe’s Telegram account had been hacked, leading to more vitriol from the community.
The token has been unable to win back investors’ trust, with experts predicting more correction in the coming days. Trader @Nebraskangooner, who has over 300K followers on Twitter, revealed that Pepe fell through its larger overall support and a descending triangle, which could lead to a move to the $0.0000004 price mark.
Analyst @CryptoTony is even more cautious, expecting the meme coin to add another zero and sweep its all-time lows.
Traders Tip Wall Street Memes IEO As Potential ‘Next Pepe’ Alternative
Pepe’s recent decline has created a vacuum in the meme coin market, with investors desperately searching for the next big token that has the potential to hit the $1 billion market cap.
Their wait may be over as experts like Satoshi Stacker are backing the exciting new Wall Street Memes to display an explosive bull rally after its launch. WSM is set to conclude its ICO in just 4 days on the 25th of September at 6pm UTC, having already raised over $25 million in the hottest presale performance of 2023.
Subsequently, Wall Street Memes will launch on multiple Tier-1 exchanges on the 27th of September, snaring 5 of the top 15 centralised exchanges on CoinMarketCap.
Investors are rushing to the presale to make last-minute purchases as it could be the final time that $WSM is available at the price of $0.337 – expert traders like Crypto Gains and Jacob Bury are predicting a 10x surge in the token’s value after launch.
Even the Crypto Whale Pumps Telegram community, which has 25K subscribers, is buzzing about the token’s potential.
The WSM token caught the attention of meme coin enthusiasts right from the start, thanks to its ties to the legendary Wall Street Bets Reddit community that sparked the GameStop bull run in 2021.
Furthermore, the developer team behind the token also has a stellar reputation in the crypto space – its Wall St Bulls NFT collection sold out in just 32 minutes, netting a cool $2.5 million.
Therefore, it is no surprise that a whale was willing to swap 553 ETH tokens – worth over $1 million at the time – to purchase WSM during the presale itself.
Interested buyers only have four days to get in on the potential next Pepe early by purchasing it through bank cards or by swapping ETH, BNB or USDT tokens.
