Meme Coins PEPE, SHIB Plummet More Than 20% Over the Week

From being the market’s biggest bulls this time last week, meme coins Pepe (PEPE) and Shiba Inu (SHIB) have now turned into the market’s biggest bears. 

Over the last seven days, both coins have plummeted in value, posting losses of over 20%, according to CoinGecko. 

PEPE leads the fall with a 22% drop, currently changing hands at $0.00000111. SHIB’s intra-week decline is virtually no lighter. The Dogecoin contender crashed 21.6% to trade at $0.00000818 on Monday morning. 

PEPE rallied hard a fortnight ago, adding $150 million to its market cap to hit 71st place on the biggest cryptocurrencies by market capitalization last Monday. All those gains have been virtually wiped out over the last seven days and it’s now sitting at 84th place, per CoinGecko.

Market leaders Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH) have also fallen hard over the last week after news that Chinese property giant Evergrande had filed for Chapter 15 bankruptcy in a Manhattan court, likely pushing many investors to dump riskier assets like crypto and tech stocks.  

Bitcoin dropped 11.4% over the week and currently trades for $26,012, while Ethereum lost 9.5% and trades at $1,674 at the time of writing. 

Shibarium: a troubled launch

SHIB’s underwhelming price performance may have been catalyzed by an underwhelming Shibarium launch. Shibarium is the Shiba Inu network’s layer-2 blockchain on Ethereum.  

On Thursday, reports made the rounds over on crypto Twitter that some $1.7 million Ethereum that had been sent to Shibarium was unrecoverable. 

On top of that, the Shibarium Remote Procedure Call (RPC), an interface for interactions with the network, doesn’t appear to be working. 

At the beginning of the month, SHIB’s consistent upward price movement was buoyed by news that the coin’s makers are attempting to shed the meme coin reputation and introduce a new identity protocol to all apps on the ecosystem for increased security and privacy. 

However, it looks like last week’s slightly shambolic Shibarium launch has vastly checked the coin's advances.