PEIPEI versus Internet Computer Protocol. You will love this review, because it's pretty much the same thing I say in all the rest of my videos, except this time we're looking at PEIPEI versus ICP instead of something else. So let's look at what PEIPEI is first, and then we'll talk about ICP.
What PEIPEI actually is
PEIPEI is a relatively new meme coin that is basically being branded as an Asian version of Pepe the Frog. If you go to their website, it's paypaycoin.vip, although I don't feel very VIP going to their website at all. This is just an Ethereum meme coin. You'll notice there's almost no information about it, and naturally there's no information about the founder. If you go to the holders, the top 500 holders have 76% of it, which is a decent distribution compared to some others. There's a bunch already on exchanges, which easily could get dumped all at once.
When you compare this as an investment that has a hundred and something million dollar market cap, well, this is not an investment, this is gambling, and it already has a $125 million market cap. Generally, the best place to make money is small coins with tiny market caps, because then it takes a relatively small amount of money to make it 100x. Whereas with this, being just an Ethereum meme coin, you're going to need a lot of money already at this point to get some significant multiples. And let's not kid ourselves: this is purely gambling. It's nothing else but gambling, because there are no fundamentals to this. It's literally just a coin and just marketing. At this point there are so many Pepe copy coins that you have to ask how many of these Pepe copy coins are really going to be successful.
Followers, bots, and fake engagement
At a roughly $120 million market cap, it has something like 20,000 followers, and you have to ask how much of this is organic traffic versus how much is being pushed by bots. Often these things get pushed by bots quite a bit. Bots promote fake engagement and then trick people into thinking it's popular. But there's no way I would touch this. I generally do not buy meme coins at all. If I did buy meme coins, though, I would want something that would be a lot more popular, and I would want something with at least a 100 times smaller market cap, so that maybe I'd have a chance to get 100x. If you're not going for 100x with a meme coin, then what's the point? Is this really going to get to $10 billion in market cap? Well, technically it is possible. You would have to exit the top at the exact right time, and you get stuck paying the Ethereum gas fees along the way. I share a lot more of how I weigh these coins the same way in my Money playlist, and I went even further on this in the time I actually tried trading meme coins and it was horrible.
Shiba Inu shows how meme coins age
Currently the largest market cap meme coin is Shiba Inu, and that is at $11 billion, and that has not gone very well since it peaked. People talk about, well, if you just bought it right when it first came out. Yeah, nobody bought it back then. Almost everybody who's bought Shiba Inu has lost money on it. And yes, it actually has outperformed Bitcoin and Ethereum a little bit over the year to date. But if you look back over the last year total, Ethereum and Bitcoin have gotten better returns than Shiba Inu, and over the last two years significantly better. Then over the last year, Shiba Inu is up a little bit compared to Bitcoin and Ethereum. Whereas if you compare to Internet Computer, ICP is about up the same over the last year as Shiba Inu. But the question is: which of these is going to make a better long-term investment? Which of these is worth putting money into, versus which one is just gambling?
Why I compare everything to Internet Computer (ICP)
If you compare to Internet Computer, the market cap is about 20 times what PEIPEI is right now. But in my opinion this has the strongest fundamentals in crypto and is the most undervalued altcoin I see anywhere right now. If you look at Internet Computer, there are actual meme coins like Pepe and Shiba Inu and Dogecoin that have bigger market caps for now. But based on everything I've seen, ICP is going to go up into the top three. So I think you have a good shot at getting 100x over the long term in ICP, and a 10x-plus in this bull run. That's my own opinion and what I'm personally invested in, not advice for you. Whereas with something like PEIPEI, this is purely depending on other people to FOMO in, to get tricked into throwing money into something that fundamentally has no value, and there's no future to it. Things that don't age well, like meme coins, are the opposite of what I want. I lay out the full version of this argument in why I believe every crypto except ICP is a meme coin.
The on-chain apps that make ICP different
For me, I want to invest in something that's going to age well, and ICP is the only true third-generation crypto. It's the only thing that can run any meaningful level of AI, like facial recognition, truly on chain. Dominic just did a demo of that. You can put an entire social network like OpenChat on chain, which I just bought $2,000 worth of today, or Tagger, which I just put $3,000 into this week. These are fully on-chain social media networks, both running on ICP, which is why 90% of my portfolio is ICP. If you want to see where the on-chain AI piece is going, Dominic Williams just explained the future of AI on ICP in a way that made all of this click for me.
The number one rule is don't lose money
The number one rule with investing is don't lose money. So to me, yes, PEIPEI could potentially have a temporary bull market pump, but this is extremely risky. To me, the chances that in four years this is down 99% are about 99%, that four years from now this is down significantly from where it's at today, because 99% of all coins can't even keep up with Bitcoin and Ethereum, since there's no fundamental reason to buy them. PEIPEI has pretty good volume right now, which means it's hot recently, and it could temporarily trend higher. But this is just gambling.
When you're gambling, you are taking on something I know all too well. I know it from being a gambling addict, and I'm glad I haven't placed a bet in many years. When you're gambling on these altcoins, it creates fear, it creates uncertainty, it creates anxiety. That's exactly what I don't have investing in Internet Computer Protocol: no fear, no anxiety. I just leave it. It doesn't matter what the price is, and I'm staking it for an indefinite period, which is a minimum of eight years from now, and I'm getting 14.9%. So even in a universe where ICP's price stayed flat and PEIPEI's price stayed flat, which is extremely unlikely, ICP would give me back about 15% a year, rounded, and PEIPEI is going to give me back nothing. That peace of mind is a big part of why I share everything I do with the Jerry Banfield Family every single day.
Copycats and anonymous teams
Given how meme coins often pump and then just end up dumping right back down, what we've seen is that these 2.0 or meme-coin wannabe coins rarely do well. You have coins that were made in the past that were kind of original. Although Dogecoin and Shiba Inu definitely have a lot in common, they're not directly overlapping; they're both dog meme coins. But when you have PEIPEI versus Pepe, these are so similar that it's just not going to do well over time.
And who's the team behind it? I am not big into investing in projects where you can't see the team, with the exception of Tagger. On Tagger there's a real founder; you can interact, the founder posts and updates it, and he's anonymous, but there's a fully functioning application with actual active users. You've got thousands of users, and it's a fully on-chain social media platform that's been active for three years, so there's something real there. The difference between Tagger and PEIPEI is that Tagger's market cap is a hundred times smaller than PEIPEI's.
Where the real degen gains are (and aren't)
So if you're looking for some more degen gains, this is not a good time to be looking for them, and PEIPEI is not a degen-gain coin to me. Something like Tagger, which I have a whole video on, you would never just buy before you use it and research it. I use Tagger every day. Something like Tagger, something like OpenChat, I think these are going to do a lot better than PEIPEI if you want kind of smaller projects.
To me the smartest approach is exactly what I'm doing, and I think it's smart naturally because I'm doing it, but I've also been in crypto 10 years. I've got 90% in ICP, because this is the most slept-on, underrated crypto in the entire market. The actual amount of real use, in terms of cycles burned, keeps climbing. You burn ICP to get cycles, cycles are pegged to a stablecoin, and then you use cycles to pay for computation. The amount of cycles burned has relentlessly gone up on ICP, 3xing every single year since it launched, and the founder thinks we could do 10x or 20x in cycles as some of these new big apps get going and get adoption.
My verdict: less risk, more upside in ICP
So ICP, to me, looks like you're going to get a much higher return compared to PEIPEI, and you have much less risk, based on the huge amounts of research and the largest research and development team in blockchain, which is DFINITY. So to me: ICP, less risk, more upside than PEIPEI. If you look at these other meme coins, they do have spikes, but most of you will not see them in the future. I think it's going to be a little risky to not successfully exit the top, and this could be the top. It might go up a little more, but it's extremely risky. So under no circumstances would I buy PEIPEI. I've made that clear. If you want the long version of why I keep landing here, that's the whole focus of my ICP Crypto playlist.
Why I do these reviews
If you found this helpful, I'm a full-time YouTuber, and I care about your success as a crypto investor first and foremost. I don't get paid by ICP or OpenChat or Tagger. I just do my own research, make my own investments, and tell you what I'm invested in. I only have three big altcoin positions: 90% ICP, three to five percent Tagger, and around three percent OpenChat. So I make that very clear. If you want to talk to me directly about any of this, off-stream and one on one, that's exactly what I'm there for inside the Jerry Banfield Family.