Pepe whales are sitting on paper profits worth more than $90 million

The Pepe memecoin has made millionaires since its launch last month — at least on paper.

The top 15 pepe whales are sitting on cumulative profits currently worth $92.6 million, according to Lookonchain.

“$PEPE is a meme coin with no intrinsic value or expectation of financial return. There is no formal team or roadmap. The coin is completely useless and for entertainment purposes only,” the pepe coin website states.

Pepe, a memecoin styled on the Pepe the Frog cartoon, has made some crypto traders millions — at least on paper — as its price skyrocketed since launching last month.

The top 15 pepe whales — large holders of the tokens — are collectively sitting on potential profits that currently total $92.6 million, according to onchain data analyzed by Lookonchain. While the whales have sold some holdings, they still hold over 38 trillion pepe coins, or around 9% of its total supply, Lookonchain said.

The profits result from simple math. The whales paid an average of $0.0000000853 per token, and the current price of the coin is around $0.00000224. That's a lot of zeros, but it adds up to a gain of 2,526%, according to CoinGecko data.

Two of the top 15 whales are sitting on paper profits of over $11 million each, with the rest seeing gains between $2.9 million and $6.9 million, according to Lookonchain. One of the whales, however, has their address blacklisted, meaning they'll likely never be able to cash out.

Meme coin trading volumes are soaring, led by pepe. Last month, Dogecoin saw volatility after Elon Musk temporarily replaced the blue Twitter bird icon.