decrypt.co
It's a red day for meme coin favorites Pepe, BONK, Floki Inu and Shiba Inu as they all post big losses over the past day. But Coinbase Ethereum L2 Base's Brett (BRETT) has seen huge gains.
At the time of writing, Pepe (PEPE) and Bonk (BONK), have each dropped 8% in the past 24 hours. Early Tuesday morning the PEPE price is sitting at $0.00001417 and the BONK price has settled at $0.000032, according to CoinGecko data.
The losses for Ethereum meme coin competitors have been less severe for Floki Inu (FLOKI) and Shiba Inu (SHIB). Both coins have lost 5% in the past day. At the time of writing, the FLOKI price has slid to $0.0002635 and the SHIB price has dropped to $0.00002383 in the past day.
Even Dogwifhat (WIF), a Solana meme coin upstart that only just started trading in December and was dubbed "the next BONK," has dropped by 5%.
Things might have been worse for FLOKI if not for an announcement from crypto market maker DWF Labs that it is buying $12 million worth of tokens—some from the treasury and the rest from the open market—to support the project's ecosystem.
It's a move meant to bolster the ecosystem as the team prepares to release its "Valhalla" metaverse game, trading bots, and a domain name service.
The Rise of Based Brett
But it's not all bad for the meme category. Based Brett (BRETT), which trades on Coinbase Ethereum Layer 2 Base, has posted a 24% gain in the past day. BRETT saw its market capitalization surpass $1 billion for the first time ever late Sunday and has now reached $1.2 billion, according to CoinGecko.
That makes it the first meme coin on Base to reach a $1 billion market cap. On Tuesday morning, BRETT had risen into the top 100 crypto assets by market cap on CoinGecko. It's currently sitting at 85, having flipped Solana bridge Wormhole (W) and Ethereum blockchain game Axie Infinity (AXS) on its way.
BRETT is a meme coin inspired by art from Matt Furie's Boy's Club comic. If his name sounds familiar, it's because he's also the artist behind Pepe the Frog. In fact, on the coin's website, it's been dubbed "Pepe's best friend on Base." The coin has been in new all-time high territory since the end of May, when it rose about $0.08 for the first time since April 9.
At the time of writing, BRETT is trading for $0.1196 and has seen $96 million worth of trading volume in the past day. Roughly half that volume has flowed through two centralized exchanges: Gate.io and Bybit, which saw 28% and 22%, respectively, of Based Brett's volume in the last day on their Tether (USDT) trading pairs.