Ether prices surged Friday as investors bet on the cryptocurrency’s newest meme coin.
ether It closed 5.61% higher at around $1,990, according to Coin Metrics. It is still below the key $2,000 level it briefly breached in April following Shapella’s upgrade.
Bitcoin It ended the day higher at $29,501.16. Since mid-April, it has been nudging back towards the $30,000 level it has been struggling to recover from.
Market participants have embarked on an attempt to bring meme mania back to cryptocurrencies. Cryptocurrencies rose earlier this year, but volatility has remained low. Many investors will continue to sit on the sidelines after the demise of FTX, waiting for the market to wash away bad actors and irresponsible or otherwise unserious ventures that contributed to some of the devastating events of 2022. I’ll be waiting.
Meme coins such as PEPE and SPONGE dogecoin Shiba Inu is driven by hype and social media, and many investors have lost big on their investments.
“Currently, there is a large amount of memecoin activity on-chain, resulting in a lot of gas and transaction fees on the Ethereum network, meaning that the supply of Ethereum is declining instead of increasing. , pushing Ethereum further into deflation.” Delphi Digital Research Analyst.
The newly minted SpongeBob token (SPONGE), which launched Thursday based on Spongebob Squarepants, has surged nearly 600% since then and is trading at less than 1 cent per coin, according to CoinMarketCap.
Pepecoin (PEPE), based on the Pepe the Frog internet meme, is up more than 120% in the last 24 hours, according to CoinMarketCap. Pepe the Frog was created by cartoonist Matt Furie in the early 2000s. In 2016, it was so appropriated by the alt-right that the US-based Anti-Defamation League put it on its list of Hate He Symbols.
“One of the main reasons Ethereum is on the rise is the resurgence of Memecoin,” said Conor Ryder, a research analyst at crypto data provider Kaiko. “Whatever your thoughts on Memecoin, the facts will drive users to trade on Ethereum and help the network earn more fees. We just hit a one-year high today.”
“As gas prices rise, more ETH will be burned, and at current activity levels ETH is a deflationary asset, which should help drive the price of ETH higher,” Ryder added. At that time, PEPE’s trading volume on Uniswap surpassed that of Tether and Wrapped Bitcoin, some of the exchange’s most-traded tokens.”
Ether ended the week higher at 4.53%, marking its second consecutive positive week and seventh in the past eight weeks. Coin Metrics measures his week in cryptocurrencies that trade 24 hours a day. This is from the stock market close at 4:00 pm ET on Friday until the following Friday.
Bitcoin ended the week up 0.35%. It’s the second consecutive positive week for Bitcoin, and the third consecutive positive week in four.
—Gina Francolla contributed to the report
