The trading volume of meme coins, which are cryptocurrencies that have their origins in online internet memes and have no intrinsic utility, increased to its highest level in two years last week. According to James Tolan's Dune analytics-tracked data, there was a massive six-fold rise to $2.3 billion in trading volume of meme coins, compared to the previous week's $387 million.

The increase in trading volume was led by pepecoin (PEPE), a frog-themed token launched in mid-April with a maximum supply of 420 trillion. PEPE hit a market capitalization of $1.82 billion at the peak of its frenzied activity last week, representing a significant success given that the meme cryptocurrencies has only been around for three weeks. Although the market cap for PEPE has gone down to $931 million at the time of this writing according to Coingecko, speculation is still going strong with other low-cap tokens such as DINO, WSB, CHAD, and 4TOKEN seeing several hundred percent growth in the last couple of weeks.

Events like this have, in the past, preceded significant tops or fall backs in the value of the leading cryptocurrency by market value, Bitcoin (BTC), and this time is no different. Presently, the price of BTC is hovering around the $27,970 mark, representing a drop of 2% despite the weakening of the US Dollar Index (DXY). Generally, BTC is seen to move in the opposite direction of DXY, which takes into account the exchange rate of the US dollar against other major currencies such as the Euro. After a momentary rise of the DXY to 101.75 following the publication of stronger than expected US jobs number, it went back down to below 101.20.

To sum up, the trading volume of meme coins has surged to a two-year high, with speculation mainly fueled by the meme cryptocurrency PEPE reaching a market capitalization of $1.82 billion at its peak last week. This major spike in activity has come to be seen as an indicator of bitcoin's coming market tops or bearish reversals. At the same time, the market value of BTC continues to plummet despite a brief bounce in the DXY, caused by the release of positive US jobs data.



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