PEPE, the latest meme coin sensation, has soared by a staggering 400% in the past week, hitting a market cap of just over $1 billion. However, following a sharp pullback on Saturday, some investors booked profits, causing a significant loss of approximately $541,000 for a whale who had purchased a substantial sum of PEPE, along with 70 $WBTC worth $2.07M and 470 $ETH worth $937K.

Bitcoin's market value decreased by 1% to $27,546 on Friday following the expiration of options worth billions of dollars and bearish bets on the cryptocurrency's Ethereum-based wrapped version, WBTC. Market makers sold their spot and contracts to maintain a direction-neutral exposure, leading to the price drop. The sale of borrowed WBTC tokens may have also contributed to the decline. WBTC is the largest wrapped version of bitcoin on Ethereum and can be swapped on a 1:1 basis for BTC. The number of WBTC borrowed from decentralized lending protocol Aave has increased by 29% in two weeks, signaling renewed interest in taking an indirect bearish bet on bitcoin.

Throughout the past weeks, both BTC whales and Wrapped Bitcoin [wBTC] whales have been more active than usual. According to Santiment, the number of transactions made by BTC whales had climbed over the past several weeks, and as of this writing, had surpassed 13,000. The number of wBTC transactions has also been growing in recent weeks, with over 100 of them as of this writing.

Wrapped Bitcoin’s (WBTC) supply on Ethereum shrunk by 23,384 — roughly 15% — to 153,164 in February — its lowest level since March 2021, according to Dune analytics data.

This article contains my opinion on why the top 20 (or top 100) of these indexes don’t present any realistic ranking of cryptocurrencies.

Mike Belshe, CEO of BitGo, responsed to questions about WBTC price action on Twitter.

Following the chaos around FTX collapse in recent weeks, speculation is now rife around the Wrapped Bitcoin (wBTC) depegging from the Bitcoin price. While the rumors suggest certain wBTC is missing as it belonged to Alameda Research, the BitGo team cited routine maintenance of DAO multisig rotation. BitGo’s wBTC order book shows that there is a slight excess in Bitcoin custody than the total wBTC in the network. It means there are more Bitcoin (BTC) to support the number of issued wBTC.

WBTC DAO, the community that administers the Wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC) project, is moving to a new smart contract multisig, replacing signers that are no longer active. The new set of signers will be responsible for signing transactions and making changes to the wrapped token’s contract if necessary.