A trader turned USD 2,000 into PEPE 🐸 for USD 43 million and sold to cash out USD 10 million.

The position of the savvy trader reached a peak of 43 million dollars during the peak valuation of PEPE, while memecoins continue to create new millionaires. A savvy cryptocurrency trader would have turned just over USD 2,000 into more than USD 43 million when the memecoin Pepe reached its peak valuation, despite the extreme volatility of the token and the lack of underlying technical value. The trader achieved a return on investment of over 4,700 times with the popular frog-themed cryptocurrency $PEPE “ This OG spent only USD 2,184 to buy 1.5B PEPE (USD 43M at the peak) in the early stages. They sold 1.02B PEPE for USD 6.66M, leaving 493MM PEPE (USD 3.64M), with a total profit of USD 10.3M (4,718x),” Lookonchain wrote in a post on X on March 29. The trader made over USD 10 million in profit despite the price of Pepe falling more than 74% from its all-time high of USD 0.00002825, which was reached on December 9, 2024, according to data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro. Memecoins are considered some of the most speculative and volatile digital assets, with price action largely driven by internet enthusiasm and social sentiment rather than fundamental utility or innovation. Nevertheless, they have proven capable of generating life-changing returns. In May 2024, another early investor in Pepe turned USD 27 into USD 52 million—a return of 1.9 million times—according to on-chain data. Memecoins are stealing the spotlight from altcoins. Despite their intrinsic lack of utility, memecoins continued to overshadow more established cryptocurrencies, said Stella Zlatareva, editor of dispatches on the digital asset investment platform Nexo, to Cointelegraph: As the demand from investors for memecoins has increased, it may also be diverting capital from more established assets. For example, Solana (SOL) has fallen more than 51% since the launch of the Official Trump token (TRUMP) in January, according to data from Cointelegraph.

Memecoins “do not tend to attract much external capital flow; instead, existing capital in the ecosystem 'moves around' from one memecoin to the next,” said Dan Hughes, founder of the decentralized finance platform Radix, to Cointelegraph, adding:

“Even in the case of TRUMP, most of the incoming liquidity was an exit from other crypto assets, with people selling their crypto portfolio to buy TRUMP in an extreme FOMO [fear of missing out] $PEPE