$PEPE Pumps While Ethereum Dumps: How to and Should You Trade Memecoins?

On April 14th, one lucky Anon put $250 of ETH into Uniswap and received just under SIX TRILLION $PEPE (lol). As of today, April 24th, that $250 is worth roughly $1,500,000! What a week. 

Let’s be honest: everybody in crypto thirsts for this type of wealth. Sure, we all say we love the tech, we love the memes, we’re here “for the culture,” we love democracy, freedom, privacy; we want trustless, permissionless systems that are censorship free… but really, we all just want to magically 1000x our wealth. 

$PEPE chart showing the candle where 'our' millionaire bought. Chart from Dextools

So now that we are being honest with ourselves, let’s look at the latest crypto FOMO fad: is $PEPE the way we can all make our millions? No. It is NOT. You are already too late. In fact, the aforementioned Anon with $1.5M of $PEPE is going to have a hard time turning his memecoin millions into usable currency. Because of relatively low liquidity in $PEPE trading pools, and slippage–loss of value for the seller–from big trades, it will take many small transactions to extract value out of the $PEPE market. 

In fact, this is what our $PEPE millionaire is currently doing. Across seven trades, selling 10 to 15,000,000 tokens at a time, this winning shitcoin tradoor has returned about 13 ETH into his wallet. Over time, this number could grow and grow. However, if we look at the timeline of $PEPE’s release and this Anon’s success, it is clear that this type of return is very atypical.

420 holders just one day after launch.

Pepe Coin was released on April 14th. It is a memecoin’s memecoin making fun of Trump’s campaign slogan declaring “Make Memecoins Great Again.” From that launch ten days ago, $PEPE has rocketed to over 42,000 holders! How $PEPE went viral is the topic of another story. But if we look at our fren the major $PEPE hodler, we can contextualize their luck. As one of the earliest to ape into the memecoin–literally bought on the coin’s release day–they were ahead of over 41,500 Pepe Coin buyers. This gives our ‘millionaire’ the opportunity to take ETH out of the trading pool. In contrast, the vast majority of $PEPE holders are either down or break even on their trade. 

Day two: holder count doubled!

So this reveals the recipe for memecoin millions, you have to be super early. Essentially, only the very first few percent of holders get to cash out while the last 90% of traders get left holding the bag. And we don’t even know if the winning trader was lucky, had inside information, or is actually a creator of Pepe Coin. Given how early this person got $PEPE, the fact that they’ve only made around $24,000 is another lesson. Yes, that is a lot of money. But this big winner, this trader who was SO early to the fad, hasn’t even gotten a life-changing sum of money from their extreme luck. 

Quadrupled holders from April 16th to 17th!

If you want to monitor $PEPE, it is slowly being added to many chart sites, and can be found on CoinMarketCap. If you want to trade $PEPE, 60% of the volume is being traded on Uniswap. While it is possible that $PEPE will surge and the memes will power it to 100,000 hodlers, it is also just as likely that the memecoin will burn out as fast as it grew.  After all, it is already down 35% from its April 19th highs. Have fun, manage your risk and don’t FOMO in. If you really want to make it big, you gotta play the lottery and find the next $PEPE.