The cryptocurrency market has seen a sharp decline over the past 24 hours, with meme coins being the hardest hit.
According to CoinGecko, the total cryptocurrency market cap fell by more than 15%, while the meme coin market cap fell by more than 12% to $113.32 billion as whales exited their positions.
Meme Market Reacts to Whale Selling
The total market cap of cryptocurrencies fell to $3.42 trillion on January 8 as most leading cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin and Ethereum, posted losses.
The declines among major meme coins were particularly severe. Popular meme coins like Dogecoin and Shiba Inu saw significant declines on the 24-hour chart, leading to a decline in the market cap of meme coins.
$DOGE was trading at $0.33 after falling 8.5% in the past 24 hours. Meanwhile, Shiba Inu recorded a decline of more than 7% in the same period.
The overall decline in the meme coin market appears to have been caused by whales exiting their positions.
According to crypto analytics platform Spotonchain, a whale has deposited 210 billion Baby tokens, worth around $3.95 million, on the Kraken exchange. Over the past two days, the whale has sold around 427 billion Baby tokens.
“Overall, this whale deposited 427 billion $PEPE to Kraken at an average price of $0.00001987 ($8.49 million) over the past two days, leaving 1 trillion PEPE ($18.5 million) with a total profit of $2.15 million (+8.67%) from this second PEPE trade,” Spotonchain said.
This move may have further strengthened the negative sentiment. Baby has also recorded losses of more than 10% on the 24-hour chart.
