FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried has done a lot despite 'fraud,' says Ethereum cofounder Vitalik Buterin PEPE Coin's 111% Overnight Surge: The Crypto Phenomenon

Whilesuggesting FTX's collapse resulted from fraud, Ethereum cofounder Vitalik Buterin cautioned critics to be more discerning Although Bankman-Fried's crypto empire continues to collapse amid federal probes into possible mismanagement of customer funds, Vitalik Buterin, who has been vocal about crypto adoption and blockchain technology, isn't ready to dismiss everything he's done

The crypto world is buzzing about PEPE, the latest meme coin that's taking the market by storm In just two weeks, PEPE has skyrocketed to become one of the top 100 cryptocurrencies, with a market cap of a whopping $582 million! And get this, in the last 24 hours alone, the PEPE token has soared a staggering 111%, and over the week, it's up an incredible 304%. Crazy, right?

Buterin tweeted, "Downgrading everything SBF believed in automatically is an error… We must figure out what contributed to the fraud and what didn't " This crash has been compared to the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy and Enron, Theranos, and Bernie Madoff fraud cases

So, what's driving this coin's meteoric rise? Well, for starters, PEPE is an ERC20 token with a supply of 420�69 trillion tokens, putting it squarely in the meme coin category And while there have been other Pepe the Frog tokens and NFTs released before, this latest PEPE coin has really caught investors' attention chaos that hit crypto markets earlier this year and suggested returning to "principles-based

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Just ask the lucky investor who turned $250 in PEPE into over $1 million in just a few days! They bought the token on April 15 and watched as it pumped an unbelievable 40,7900% in just four days Today, their wallet holds 3 9 trillion coins, worth over $5 3 million! Not bad for a little-known meme coin, eh?

Vitalik Buterin warned against DeFi (decentralized finance) and self-custody pitfalls, specifically bugs in smart contract codes, in a tweet from his verified Twitter account� In response to the loss of trust in centralized exchanges, which led to record exchange outflows, Buterin wrote, "The DeFi and self-custody ethos did very well this week " To prevent smart contract exploits, Buterin advised developers to keep their code simple and perform audits and formal verification.

But it's not just individual investors who are jumping on the PEPE bandwagon� This coin's popularity is reflected in the Google Trend score for "pepecoin," which surged from 3 to 100 in just one week! And with listings on several cryptocurrency exchanges, including OKX, Huobi, Gate io, and MEXC, it's no wonder that PEPE is attracting so much attention

Buterin warns of DeFi risks.

"My biggest concern is if we have $10B in a ZK-rollup 2 years from now and it gets hacked due to circuit constraint bugs or the EVM wrapper," wrote Buterin, attaching "Hardening rollups with multiproofs "

In fact, DeFi volumes for PEPE have surged, with volumes around the token jumping from $2 99 million on April 15 to over $240 million with multiple liquidity pools and centralized exchange listings And if you need more proof that this coin is hot, just take a look at Nansen's Ethereum analytics dashboard, which shows that over 30 "smart money" wallets bought

PEPE tokens worth around $1 million in the last week alone� That's some serious coin!

As crypto exchanges saw a record-high week of outflows of bitcoin following the FTX saga, industry leaders have begun advocating self-custody solutions �

So, what's next for PEPE? Who knows! With its wild success so far, the sky's the limit for this meme-inspired cryptocurrency All we can do is sit back and watch as PEPE continues to soar to new heights —Crypto Weekly

—Crypto Weekly