Pepe whale turns to ChatGPT-created memecoin called Turbo

Quick Take

  • A whale who’s profited from the Pepe memecoin craze appears to have a fresh target — a token generated with ChatGPT for $69.
  • The Turbo token has surged over 50% in the past 24 hours. 

A large holder of the Pepe memecoin styled on the Pepe the Frog cartoon has a new trade — a token created by using OpenAI's ChatGPT language model for $69 called Turbo. 

A whale who has earned $14.5 million trading Pepe has been buying Turbo since May 3, according to on-chain data analyzed by Lookonchain. The trader is in the green, having bought 1.38 billion Turbo tokens for $977,000 that are now currently worth around $1.9 million.

"This whale was not an early buyer of $PEPE, but he kept buying $PEPE from Apr 19 to 27 when the price of $PEPE was depressed," Lookonchain wrote on Twitter. "So is he buying $TURBO because he knows something we don't?"

Turbo token surge comes amid fresh memecoin craze

The action is the latest in a fresh memecoin craze that has some wondering if crypto winter may be ending. Trading in the tokens is obviously risky, and decentralized exchange Uniswap currently has a warning posted about the token. That hasn't stopped it from surging 53.4% over the past 24 hours, according to DexScreener

Turbo was launched last month, with its developer saying on Twitter that the memecoin was "built from scratch with ChatGPT-4."

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The project's whitepaper details a budget of $69, a total supply of 69 billion tokens and says the memecoin "aims to establish itself as a leading meme coin with a unique identity and a strong focus on simplicity, fairness, and community engagement."

The token has more than doubled in price since trading ramped up earlier this month, and it currently has a market cap of $94.5 million, according to CoinMarketCap, which would place it among the top 10 memecoins.

Turbo's volume over the past 24 hours reached $141.8 million to make it the third-most traded memecoin behind Pepe and Dogecoin. The token pulled ahead of Shiba Inu in terms of volume traded on Tuesday.

(Updates prices throughout.)


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About Author

Nathan Crooks is the U.S managing editor at The Block, based in Miami. He was previously at Bloomberg News for 12 years, where he helmed coverage of South Florida after roles as a breaking news editor and bureau chief in Caracas, Venezuela. He's interviewed presidents, government ministers and CEOs, and, besides crypto, has covered major news events on the ground from earthquakes to hurricanes to the Chilean mine rescue in 2018. Nathan, a native of Clarion, Pennsylvania, holds a bachelor's degree from the University of Toronto, where he completed a specialist in political science, and an MBA from American University in Washington, D.C.

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