This Week in Coins: Bitcoin Stumbles but Meme Coins Come Out Winning—Again

Bitcoin’s movements have been unremarkable this week, weakly wavering seven days after its long-anticipated halving event—but one category of crypto has come out winning: meme coins.

Over the past week, Bonk has made the biggest gains, according to CoinGecko data. The Solana-based token is up 58%.

The reason for the dog coin’s rise is in part due to the Bonk DAO approving a proposal to burn over 278 billion Bonk tokens—seen as a bullish move because it makes the token scarcer.

Elsewhere, Pepe, another popular meme token, shot up significantly: it posted gains of 36% this week. When one meme starts pumping, others in the market tend to do so, too.

Pepe, which runs on Ethereum, has experienced big price action since Coinbase International, the global branch of the largest U.S. crypto exchange, announced the listing of Pepe perpetual contracts.

Other meme coins that have soared include Floki, which has jumped more than 20% over the week.

Memes aside, Hedera, a distributed ledger akin to a blockchain, also soared on news that digital asset exchange Archax would use it to offer BlackRock’s ICS U.S. Treasury money market fund (MMF). As a result, the Hedera token has jumped over the past week by 32% and is now priced at $0.1086, making it one of the week’s winners.

The price of Bitcoin stands at $62,991 after barely budging over the week. The sluggish price action came alongside a rush of cash out of newly approved Bitcoin exchange-traded funds.

Those outflows were likely triggered by Aafederal economic report that indicated that the American economy grew slower than expected in the first quarter, likely spooking investors with an appetite for the risky cryptocurrency.

Meanwhile, big news dropped that Ethereum software giant Consensys had filed suit against the Securities and Exchange Commission for allegedly planning to designate Ethereum as a security. The second biggest cryptocurrency is up over seven days by 2% and is now trading for $3,120.

Edited by Ryan Ozawa.