• Pepe coin skyrocketed by 23% earlier today to hit its highest price in July as its weekly gains hit 33%, with the market finally reclining $5 billion.
• VC firm Nascent racked up 141 billion PEPE coins, swapping most of its crypto holdings to switch to the meme coin, helping the market cap to rise by 136%.

Pepe coin has been one of the best performers in the past 24 hours, with the frog-themed meme coin surging over 20% to reclaim the $5 billion market cap level for the first since the month began.

Earlier today, PEPE surged from $0.0000101 to hit an intra-day high of $ 0.0000125, pushing its market cap to $5.26 billion. This is the highest the coin has traded since July 1.

The meme coin’s momentum has since slowed down and now trades at $0.00001226, which is still 18% higher than 24 hours ago. This makes it the third-highest gainer in the top 100 coins, trailing only Worldcoin and CORE respectively. On the weekly chart, the token has gained 36%. 

Pepe’s sharp rise wasn’t a fluke, with the trading volume charts proving that investors are firmly behind the third-largest meme coin in the market. In the past day, it recorded $2.328 billion, the eighth-highest in the entire market and outpacing BNB, whose market cap is 17x higher, as noted by Web3 thought leader Brian Garett.

Despite the continued rise, Pepe is still trading 28% below its all-time high of $ 0.0000172, which it hit less than two months ago. Some analysts, like Crypto God John, believe that the token is bracing to retest its ATH in the current rally. He posted the chart below to his 686,000 Twitter followers indicating the coin’s path to a new record high.

Another analyst, NFT Davie, told his followers that the meme coin has now broken free of all its downward channels that had characterized its descent from its all-time high in May. He believes that it’s now in a new bullish phase that could hit uncharted territory.

What’s Next for PEPE?

As Pepe’s trading volume was surging past BNB and fellow meme coins Dogecoin and WIF, blockchain analysis showed that one entity had racked up an eye-catching amount of the token.

Data from Lookonchain showed that wallets belonging to VC fund Nascent had accrued 141.23 billion PEPE, worth over $1.5 million. The company transferred 1,215 MKR tokens to Binance which it sold for $3.41 million and spent it on PEPE and Lido DAO’s LDO tokens. Nascent now holds over 600 billion PEPE tokens, worth $7.5 million. As CNF reported over the weekend, another whale moved $82 million worth of Pepe on Bybit.

Despite the sharp surge, analysts believe that the meme coin still has heights to scale, amid a wider meme coin market resurgence as we reported earlier today. Crypto exchange Changelly says the meme coin will surge 40% over the next ten days and should double its price to hit $0.00002427 by August 4. Ten days later, the exchange expects the token to have surged an incredible 250% to trade at $0.00004192.

Another analyst backed the bullish thesis, noting that the token has been trading on a long descending pattern since May. It has since broken from this pattern and could surge sharply over the next two weeks, as the graph below shows.