The crypto market has witnessed an extraordinary event in recent times, as over 6.9 trillion PEPE tokens were burned by the team behind the frog-themed meme coin. Traders reacted positively to the burn, with Pepe seeing an over 30% price increase.
$5.5M Worth Of PEPE Tokens Destroyed
The PEPE project team has set fire to trillions of tokens.
The team announced in a post on the X (formerly Twitter) platform that 6.9 trillion PEPE tokens, worth approximately $5.5 million, were burned. For those unfamiliar with the term, burning tokens permanently deletes them from the supply by sending them to dead-end wallets not controlled by any entity, making circulating tokens more valuable if demand increases.
The team now remains with roughly 3.79 trillion tokens (valued at $3.72 million), which would not have a considerable impact if sold on the open market.
“A new team of advisors has been brought on to guide Pepe forward,” the Pepe team revealed. “Uses for the remaining 3.79T tokens attributed to the original team CEX multi-sig wallet for strategic partnerships and marketing opportunities are currently being explored.”
The token burn comes after some rogue developers on the Pepecoin team illicitly sent approximately 16 trillion PEPE tokens (worth $16 million) from one of the project’s multi-sig wallets to exchanges and sold them. The debacle in August prompted accusations of a rug pull and contributed to an 18% slide in the frog-themed tokens.
Token Burn Lifts PEPE’s Price
The PEPE tokens burned equate to 1.6% of the meme coin’s total supply. The price of Pepe reacted positively to the burn, rising 33.3% in the last 24 hours, according to CoinGecko data. The meme coin’s market cap is currently $366 million, and it’s currently the 92nd biggest compared to all other cryptocurrencies.
PEPE’s rally comes as Bitcoin and Ethereum enjoyed nice rallies on Tuesday, with the broader cryptocurrency market adding 9.2% to its market cap overnight. The bellwether crypto zoomed past $35,000 late on Monday before retracing to $34,477 at publication time.
Suffice it to say, Pepecoin was one of this year’s biggest success stories amid a general lull in the market, blasting to a peak market cap of $1.8 billion in mid-May and registering trading volumes that transcended those of Dogecoin (DOGE) and Shiba Inu (SHIB) — which are essentially the industry’s largest meme coins by trading volume.