A rally in a brand-new meme-coin hit a roadblock Tuesday when the market value of the token PEPE neared $2 billion. The 12% decline against the U.S. dollar, plummeted its market valuation beneath the $1 billion threshold to a present value of $790 million. 

The meme-coin marketplace was shaken and took a 7% loss against the dollar, with the top six prominent meme tokens experiencing losses within 24 hours.

Experts are predicting this may be bad news for Bitcoin.

Launched in mid-April 2023, PEPE became a tradeable commodity. The PEPE meme token, inspired by Pepe the Frog joined other popular meme-coins like dogecoin and  Shiba Inu tokens. 

Meme-coin saga

Meme-coins are cryptocurrencies created with the likeness of internet memes. In most cases, they are popularized and promoted by influencers.  Elon Musk made dogecoin and baby doge famous. 

Numerous investors reaped big bucks when the PEPE meme token market was surging. And on May 5 it reached its all-time high (ATH) of $1.8 billion. Unfortunately, since then it plunged over 50%. And by May 9 its market valuation rests below $1 billion at $790 million.

Despite the devaluation, PEPE’s all-time low was set on April 18. Then the meme-coin recovered and gained over 500% when compared to the U.S. dollar. 

Since May 5, the gains stopped.  PEPE still boasts $804 million in daily global trade volume. And it ranks eighth among total crypto trade volumes.

There are currently 106,430 PEPE holders. The top 100 wealthiest owners of PEPE hold over 54% of the entire supply. And the top ten wallets hold 34.07% of all existing PEPE tokens.

There are also five exchanges, including Binance and Okx, that own big caches of PEPE.

The meme coin market has been trailing a downward with the broader crypto economy for weeks. 

This week the meme-coin sector has shed 7% of its value. DOGE, SHIB, PEPE, FLOKI, and BABYDOGE have all experienced declines. 

Meme token turbo (TURBO), Tamadoge (TAMA), and shih tzu (SHIH) have all increased against the value of the dollar by 43.1%, 18%, and 13% respectively.