Bitcoin and Ethereum Recover While Pepe Gets Squeezed

While most leading cryptocurrencies spent the week recovering, shady transactions from PepeCoin’s team kept the meme coin in free fall.

This week markets appeared grateful for the dearth of news—”no news is good news,” as the saying goes. Most leading cryptocurrencies recovered their losses over the week after last Thursday’s flash crash sank virtually all leading cryptocurrencies by double-digit percentages.

Bitcoin (BTC) currently holds the fort at $26,015, about 0.4% cheaper than it was this time last week. A lot of Bitcoin mining machinery came online this week, as evinced by the fact that the network on Wednesday hit a new all-time high for mining difficulty alongside a corresponding spike in hash rate, or computational power. 

Ethereum (ETH), the second biggest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, matched Bitcoin’s pace. At its current price of $1,647, it is down 1.6% from last week. 

Broadly speaking, most top thirty cryptocurrencies retained their value. The only notable depreciation over the last seven days fell upon holders of Uniswap (UNI) and Avalanche (AVAX). AVAX fell 7.2% to $10.02, while UNI crashed 7.9% to $4.58.

Meme coin PEPE is still in freefall. On Monday it posted intraweek losses of over 20% as it slid from 71st to 84th place. It now enters the weekend at $0.000000865154—the 98th biggest cryptocurrency by market cap—or about 23.3% lower than it was a week ago.

Adding to its generally poor performance, the PepeCoin team’s multi-sig Ethereum address transferred 16.045 trillion PEPE—worth $16.85 million at the time—to four exchanges: Binance, OKX, KuCoin, and Bybit, on Thursday.The lack of communication from the team about these transfers contributed to some heated panic selling.