Alleged BlackRock Wallet Address Withdrew $1.2M Worth PEPE: On-Chain Data

PEPE’s rise has ignited renewed investor interest in memecoins as a whole, and the frenzy continued even as bitcoin’s 2023 rally stalled.

A wallet bearing the name of investment giant BlackRock withdrew 1.27 trillion PEPE (which is worth around $1.98 million) from Binance to four addresses on May 18th.

• According to Lookonchain’s data, these four addresses use the same Binance deposit address as blackrockfund3.eth.
• On April 21, BlackRock Fund purchased 1T PEPE (worth around $244K at that time) at an average price of $0.0000002431 and sold the entire stash (worth $2.63 million at that time) at an average price of $0.000002627 on May 5, profiting 10x, i.e., approximately $2.39 million in the process.
• The on-chain platform speculated that the four addresses were most likely created by the American investment company.
• While it’s not unusual for prominent market players to embrace memecoins, many in the community were skeptical of BlackRock’s participation in the frenzy primarily because it is the world’s largest asset manager.
• Despite being reluctant to tap the industry at first, BlackRock steadily boosted its portfolio allocation of crypto and subsequently gained prominence with its Coinbase partnership.
• BlackRock was also one of the high-profile investors of FTX. Hence, the notion of the investment giant jumping on the PEPE bandwagon just months after losing $24 million in the collapsed crypto exchange appears highly unlikely.
• In an annual letter to shareholders, BlackRock’s chief executive Larry Fink said the asset manager is exploring permissioned blockchains and tokenization of stocks and bonds areas of the digital asset ecosystem.