The price of ether bounced as investors risked on crypto's newest meme coins

May 8, 2023: On Friday, the price of ether bounced as investors risked on crypto’s newest meme coins.

Ether increased over 6% to $1,991,05, according to Coin Metrics. It’s still below the critical $2,000 level it briefly broke through in April after the Shapella upgrade.

Bitcoin was higher by over 2% to $29,496.34. It inches back towards the $30,000 level it’s issued to recover since mid-April.

Cryptocurrencies rallied to start the year but have seen mainly low volatility. Market participants put the go on attempts to bring meme mania back to crypto. Many investors kept on the sidelines following the collapse of FTX, which waits for the market to wash out bad actors and not caring or unserious projects that contributed to some of the catastrophic events of 2022.

Memecoins such as PEPE, SPONGE, and dogecoin or shiba inu are driven by demand and social media, and investors have suffered huge losses from investing in them.

“There’s a ton of meme coin activity on-chain right now that’s generating a lot of gas payments,” or transaction fees on the Ethereum network, and “pushing ETH more deflationary,” meaning its supply is decreasing instead of increasing, said Michael Rinko, a research analyst at Delphi Digital.

On Monday, the recently made SpongeBob token (SPONGE), based on Spongebob Squarepants launched, has surged almost 600% since and is trading at below 1 cent per coin, the CoinMarketCap.

Pepecoin (PEPE), which is related to the Pepe the Frog internet meme, is up over 120% in the past 24 hours, CoinMarketCap said. Cartoonist Matt Furie created Pepe the Frog in the early 2000s. It was appropriated by the alt-right that the U.S.-based Anti-Defamation League put it on a list of hate symbols.