Pepecoin (PEPE) is up over 79% on the week, leading a meme coin rally that’s seen Dogecoin (DOGE), Shiba Inu (SHIB) and Floki Inu (FLOKI) rise by double digits in the same timespan.

Over the week, Dogecoin has risen by 11.2%, Shiba Inu by 25.6% and Floki Inu by 30.9%, per data from CoinGecko.

The momentum has built over the week, with the total market cap of meme coins posting gains of 11% in the past day, over 2.5 times that of the 4.2% gains seen by the total market cap of all cryptocurrencies.

PEPE’s price chart shows that a considerable portion of the surge came late on June 21, likely following Bitcoin’s strong bullish action above $30,000. At time of going to press, PEPE is up over 43% in the last 24 hours, at $0.00000151.

Besides an uptrend in Bitcoin pulling PEPE along in its wake, U.S.-based Gemini exchange also hinted at a PEPE listing.

Shiba Inu developers, meanwhile, announced the launch of Shibacals, a protocol to tag real-world assets as NFTs, likely boosting positive sentiment around the dog-themed meme coin.

Shibacals will employ Near Field Communication (NFC) chips to digitally authenticate physical items on the Shibarium blockchain. An NFC chip enables wireless connection over short distances.

Shibarium is a Ethereum layer-2 blockchain that uses SHIB, Bone (BONE) and Leash (LEASE) tokens for ecosystem development.

Crypto sentiment turns bullish 

The Crypto Fear & Greed index by alternative recorded a steep rise in the last two days, touching two-month levels of 65, indicating a rise in bullish sentiment.

Crypto fear and greed index. Source: alternative
Crypto fear and greed index. Source: alternative

The index quantifies the crypto market’s sentiment by using signals such as Google trends, surveys, price action, and volume momentum. The metric fluctuates between 0 to 100 with higher values representing overbought conditions and vice-versa.

The total cryptocurrency market cap reached $1.22 trillion on Thursday, erasing the losses incurred in June after the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commision brought lawsuits against Binance and Coinbase.

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