The short version
- PEPE whale alert: two wallets Arkham ties to Justin Sun took 11.92 trillion PEPE out of Poloniex on October 17 and 26, about 2.8% of the supply and roughly $58 million at the time of writing.
- A day after the second batch, one of the wallets sent 20 million USDT back to Poloniex, close to what that PEPE was worth, which looks like an over-the-counter buy; Sun has not commented.
- The crew is watching the two wallets for any deposit back to an exchange, and $0.00000511 on the PEPE price, the October 23 high that capped today’s 12% jump.
A new PEPE whale has a famous name on it. Two wallets that Arkham ties to Tron founder Justin Sun now hold 11.92 trillion PEPE, about 2.8% of all the frog coins in existence and worth roughly $58 million at the time of writing.
Both Justin Sun PEPE stacks came out of Poloniex, the exchange Sun has backed since 2019, in the past 11 days. PEPE is up 12% in 24 hours to $0.00000485 while the market waits for the Fed. So did Sun just buy one of the biggest PEPE bags outside the exchanges, or move tokens he already had?
Arkham flagged the wallets on Tuesday:
Is Justin Sun the Top PEPE Holder?
Between his official and predicted wallets, Justin Sun holds almost 3% of the PEPE supply, worth $51.25M.
These PEPE tokens moved into his wallets in the past 10 days – making him the top individual holding PEPE.
What the Justin Sun PEPE Wallets Show
The first wallet, 0x176F…0a132, carries a Justin Sun label on Arkham. At 14:29 UTC on October 17 it received 7.2 trillion PEPE from a Poloniex multisig wallet, worth about $28.4 million at the time. It now holds 7.27 trillion.
The second, 0x7213…E5991, has no name tag, but Arkham counts it as Sun’s because his known wallets funded it. On October 26 Poloniex’s hot wallet sent it a 1 million PEPE test transfer, then 4.65 trillion PEPE at 15:54 UTC, worth about $20.3 million.
Together that is 11.92 trillion of PEPE’s 420.69 trillion supply. On the Etherscan holder list, only four addresses hold more than the two wallets combined: a Binance hot wallet, an OKX cold wallet and two wallets with no label at all. That’s why Arkham calls Sun the top individual PEPE holder.
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Did Justin Sun Buy PEPE or Just Move It?
The chain can’t say for sure, but one transfer points to a purchase. About 17 hours after the second batch landed, at 09:12 UTC on October 27, the same 0x7213 wallet sent 20,008,969 USDT to the Poloniex multisig that sent the first 7.2 trillion. That is within 2% of what the 4.65 trillion PEPE was worth when it arrived.
A $20 million stablecoin payment back to the exchange the tokens came from looks a lot like paying for an over-the-counter (OTC) buy. Arkham hasn’t linked the two, and Sun hasn’t said anything about PEPE publicly.
If both batches were bought at the market price, the average entry sits near $0.00000411. At today’s price that is a paper gain of about $9 million in 11 days.
SIDE TRAIL: PEPE Price Slips 11% After Brian Armstrong’s Meme Sent It to a One-Month High
Why a PEPE Whale This Size Matters
PEPE has no unlocks or vesting schedule, so the big wallets are the supply story. Canary Capital’s amended filing for a spot PEPE ETF says it plainly: “Ownership of PEPE is highly concentrated,” and moves by whales have “at times been associated with significant movements” in meme coin prices. The ten largest wallets held about 41% of supply in January, most of them exchanges.
Sun’s stack works both ways. While it sits in his own wallets it is 11.92 trillion PEPE that isn’t on an order book. But the PEPE whale’s stack equals about 12% of PEPE’s $475 million in daily trading volume, so if those tokens ever head back to an exchange, the market will notice. The wallets to watch are 0x176F and 0x7213; a deposit from either to Poloniex, Binance or HTX would be the first sign.
PEPE Price: Can It Clear $0.00000511?
Not yet. The PEPE price touched $0.00000502 on Binance today and pulled back to $0.00000485, just under the October 23 high at $0.00000511. Above that, the September 22 top at $0.00000536 is the level that capped the whole autumn. Support is at $0.00000406, with the 50-day moving average close by at $0.00000413.
A daily close above $0.00000511 would break the run of lower highs that started in September. A PEPE whale buying is a reason to look, not a reason to chase: Sun is in at about $0.00000411, and most traders reading this news are not.
TRAIL MAP: Market Cap, Supply and Why “Cheap” Coins Aren’t Cheap
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