Frog-themed cryptocurrency PEPE has witnessed a sell-off by a whale investor who dumped trillions of Pepe tokens for ETH. The whale, an early investor in PEPE, had accumulated over 1.73 trillion PEPE tokens at its very inception.
Pepe, an Ethereum-based token, launched on April 17, 2023. Following in the footsteps of meme coins like Dogecoin (DOGE) and Shiba Inu (SHIB), PEPE swiftly gained popularity and investors' interest shortly after its inception.
Notably, the whale bought the PEPE tokens at $0.00000005406 worth $936,000 in April and May 2023.
According to Spotonchain, a blockchain analytics platform, the whale has just sold its holdings. A total of 1.731 trillion PEPE worth $1.74 million was exchanged for 742.6 ETH at $0.000001004 in recent hours. The whale realized $802,500, or 85.7%, in profit after the sales.
PEPE subsequently experienced a sharp decline in its price, tumbling 11% in the last 24 hours. At the time of writing, PEPE was down 10.82% in the last 24 hours to $0.0000009414.
PEPE had steadily declined since attaining highs of $0.000001015 on Jan. 11. The declines were exacerbated as bears ravaged the market shortly after the Bitcoin spot ETF approval. As a result of the drops, PEPE fell to nearly three-month lows, and it lost its daily moving averages.
Over the weekend, PEPE sparked speculation after it flagged some suspicious activity on the PEPE deployer.
PEPE maintains that these transactions and any future transactions from the deployer wallet have no association with its remaining team, and PEPE is not associated with any other projects or tokens. It traces the suspicious transactions to its nefarious ex-team members who previously stole from the PEPE treasury.