Pepe’s price decline has seen its total valuation dipping from a high of $1.82bln on May 6 to $820mln at one point

The market cap of new memecoin Pepe (PEPE) has dropped $1.1bln from its May 6 high, nonetheless on-chain data shows it is still being bought by some crypto whales.

During the past five days, the price of the memecoin has slumped over 56 per cent, dropping from a high of $0.00000431 to $0.00000193, as per CoinGecko.

Pepe’s price decline has seen its total valuation dipping from a high of $1.82bln on May 6 to $820mln at one point.

A May 8 report by researchers from crypto fintech firm Matrixport attributed Pepe’s steep price drop to traders selling big parts of their holdings to new retail investors after the memecoin’s listing on Binance, the world’s biggest crypto exchange in terms of daily trading volume.

Moreover, the report found that the biggest driver of Pepe’s rapid price action since its inception on April 14, appears to be coming from traders based in Asia. As per Matrixport, buying activity during Asian trading hours contributed an astounding 3,657 per cent to the total 9,071 per cent rally in the memecoin as of May 8.

One more data that could validate the theory is that Ethereum deposits in the 24 hours after the memecoin’s listing on Binance soared to peaks not seen since November 2021.

Crypto market intelligence firm Santiment proposed that this was largely because of early buyers of Pepe securing profits by transferring their holdings — which were mainly bought by way of ether swaps on decentralized exchanges such as Uniswap and 1inch — back into ether.

In spite of the sharp drop in price over the last week, some of the more well-known and notorious whales in the crypto space are still buying Pepe at low prices.

As per data from blockchain analytics firm Lookonchain, “Machi Big Brother”, the online persona of ex tech entrepreneur Jeffrey Huang, has bought a total of 73.4 ether — equivalent to nearly $137k of Pepe — during the last 4 days, with an average purchase price of $0.000002082, which is nearly 3 per cent below the current trading price.