Sense has prevailed and the frothy memecoin change in the crypto weather has completely quelled. R…right? Yeah, maybe not just yet. Not if transaction-fee-hungry crypto exchanges have anything to do with it.

Exchanges such as the Winklevoss-twins-owned Gemini, which has just now listed the world’s most successful frog-themed, strictly-no-utility memecoin OF ALL TIME… Pepe ($PEPE).

And that’s likely much to the chagrin of sensible, actual rocket-scientist, PhD-in-Engineering-holding crypto analysts such as Benjamin Cowen. Not saying he doesn’t have a point here…

… but attempting to catch memecoins ridiculously early seems to be half the fun for the gambling/degen end of  the market. Some early-buying, early-selling chancers have made heady profits in the memecoin-hunting game. Most have not.

Just a reminder – laying down “money you can’t afford to lose” on the crypto craps table is a very bad idea indeed, lest you wind up like one of the zombies in this Beeple pic, trying to desperately claw it all back with increasingly risky and desperate trades…

At the time of writing, the ERC-20 token Pepe (PEPE) is up about 7% over the past 24 hours, having made something of a comeback after a pretty dramatic fall over the past few days since it busted through a US$1bn market cap. It currently has a valuation of about US$820 million, according to CoinGecko.

Not too shabby for a token that does absolutely nothing but represent the monetary exchange of a meme.

Incidentally, the BRC-20 version of Pepe is up 46% at the time of writing, with a market cap valuation of US$35.4 million.

 

What else is making crypto news today?

• OKX, a rising star in the Clash of the Crypto Exchange Giants appears to have taken a bit of a swipe at one of its biggest rivals, Coinbase, in a flashy new ad.

The expensive-looking global ad campaign comes after a Coinbase marketing effort that launched the other day, in which it used the tagline: “It’s time to update the system”. And that was a reference to America’s “ageing financial infrastructure” and the benefits of crypto that the exchange believes can help usher in vastly improved methods of finance for the digital age.

OKX’s subsequent ad, however (which seems like a remarkably swift response, by the way), argues instead that “the system” is completely broken and doesn’t need an update, but a “rewrite”.

• Speaking of Coinbase, the former product manager for the firm, Ishan Wahi, who was arrested in July last year for insider trading (he provided his brother with info about upcoming token listings), has received a two-year prison sentence.

The US Department of Justice has those matter-of-fact details here.

• NFT project Pudgy Penguins has managed to raise US$9 million in a seed-funding round led by 1kx – an early-stage venture fund firm based in Berlin. According to CoinDesk, the company behind the penguin-themed NFTs “plans to use the new capital to scale its intellectual property and team”.

Top 10 overview

With the overall crypto market cap at US$1.19 trillion, up about 0.4% since this time yesterday, here’s the current state of play among top 10 tokens – according to CoinGecko.

 

Around the blocks

Some pertinence and randomness that stuck with us on our afternoon moves through the Crypto Twitterverse.

 

Note: at the time of writing, the author of this piece holds Bitcoin, Ethereum, and several highly speculative altcoins, including $PEPE. This is not necessarily the way. 

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