PEPE quietly pulled off a 100% rally earlier this week, raising questions on whether the frog-themed memecoin will become a serious Dogecoin competitor.
A few months ago Pepecoin came and went, bringing quick, unimaginable riches to early investors and turning latecomers into reluctant bag holders.
While the chart resembles the standard crypto pump-and-dump scheme, Pepecoin’s (PEPE) price action this week suggests that the frog-themed token could be the newest contender to Dogecoin (DOGE) in the memecoin sector.
Dogecoin has dominated the memecoin space for years. Many copycats of dog-themed tokens, like Shiba Inu (SHIB) and Floki (FLOKI), have challenged DOGE’s position over the years but eventually faded.
SHIB briefly surpassed DOGE in market capitalization after rising 1,000% to a peak valuation of $41.1 billion on Oct. 28, 2021. At the time, Dogecoin’s market capitalization was $31.5 billion.
However, the near-vertical rally faded in the following weeks, and Dogecoin reclaimed its top spot in the memecoin category.
Presently, Dogecoin ranks ninth in the cryptocurrency space concerning market capitalization, with Shiba Inu trading at less than half of Dogecoin’s valuation.
A new entrant in this segment launched on April 15. A frog-themed ERC-20 token on Ethereum, Pepecoin, has made it to the top 100 coins by market capitalization.
PEPE hops in to steal the show
PEPE also led the sector’s gains in the latest crypto rally amid a flurry of Bitcoin exchange-traded fund fillings in the United States.
The token’s gains were accentuated by hints dropped by the U.S.-based Gemini exchange of a potential PEPE coin listing.
Feeling pepish about something coming soon… pic.twitter.com/PEwsTOVT22
— Gemini (@Gemini) June 22, 2023
The 100% increase recorded by PEPE from $0.000000833 on June 20 to $0.00000167 in less than a week might be due to hopes around future listings on U.S. exchanges like Coinbase.
While PEPE enjoys bullish momentum, let’s look at its performance compared to DOGE over the past two months.
Will Pepecoin flip Dogecoin?
Pepecoin rose to prominence in May 2023, leading the memecoin hype on Ethereum. While there have been previous attempts at frog-themed tokens and nonfungible tokens (NFTs), this version became particularly popular in a very short time span.
Pepecoin peaked at 13.8% of Dogecoin’s market capitalization on May 6; however, it has been in a down-only trend since.
The token picked up momentum with the latest bullish move in Bitcoin (BTC) above $30,000, leading the market’s gains with a 100% increase from a valuation of $393 million on June 20 to $786 million on June 23.
The token’s market share in terms of Dogecoin’s market capitalization increased from 6% to 7% on June 23.
Concerning trading volumes, PEPE led DOGE during the memecoin hype on Ethereum. At its peak, PEPE reached highs of over $1.5 billion, around four times that of DOGE.
However, Pepecoin’s trading volume dried up after the memecoin hype cooled down, falling below Dogecoin. The potential listing on U.S.-based exchanges could likely improve Pepecoin’s trading volumes over the coming months.
The Google keyword search trend for Dogecoin and Pepecoin shows that the interest in Pepecoin nearly reached par with Dogecoin in the first week of May.
Related: PEPE vs. DOGE: How the memecoins performed their first time hitting a $1B market cap
However, the volume of “Pepecoin” searches on Google has subsided since then, with “Dogecoin” maintaining a seven to eight times higher average than PEPE.
Pepecoin also enjoys certain advantages over Dogecoin, including that it resides natively on Ethereum, which means it can see future integrations with Ethereum’s decentralized finance and NFT ecosystem.
Moreover, Pepecoin has a fixed supply of 420.69 trillion, while Dogecoin uses a proof-of-work consensus mechanism and has a fixed yearly issuance of 5 billion coins.
However, based on its market capitalization and popularity on Google, Pepecoin still has a long way to go before it becomes a mainstream memecoin like Dogecoin.
On top of that, Dogecoin enjoys a first-mover advantage and network-effort dominance, having been around for over eight years, while Pepecoin is only a couple of months old.
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