Since the beginning of the uptrend a lot of newbies joined the crypto verse. Naturally, we saw a lot of fresh speculation: “Why put 100$ into Dogecoin to take it out when it goes to 1$? Better put in PEPE to make more money.” With that mindset, your money is ripe for the taking because you don’t understand market capitalization, so let’s understand it in this article.
What is Market Capitalization AKA MarketCap AKA MC
Many people think that a coin’s price increases magically when inflows happen. In reality, people buy an asset and when the demand outgrows the supply, its price appreciates. This is reflected in its market capitalization, which we will call MC from here on.
MC is the number of coins in circulation multiplied by its price. This is the very basic way of knowing whether an asset is overvalued or undervalued.
If I want to know how much my investment in Dogecoin can grow, I need to know its current MC to speculate. So I can multiply 0.38$ in 146 Billion coins to get $56B. This is the MC of Dogecoin.
Why is the MC useful?
Investors in the crypto verse use the MC to evaluate coins. This is how they can say that a project is overvalued or undervalued. It is also how they calculate how much room the project has to grow. If we look at the MC of Dogecoin, we notice that it is 7th largest project in the space. For it to reach 1$, it needs inflows of 2.6 times its size to reach 1$, which is roughly $90B.
From this, we can conclude that there isn’t much room for Dogecoin to grow. However, it is realistic that during a crazy Altseason in 2025, Dogecoin could at least tap or touch the 1$ briefly.
On the other hand if we check a project like Bitcoin, its MC is $1.93T. This means that the same $90B inflows into Bitcoin would translate into a price appreciation of around 10%. On Ethereum, $90B of inflows would appreciate the price by roughly 25–30% and on Solana would cause almost 85–90% price increase.
The effect on the price differs because of the law of diminishing returns. The larger the MC, the harder the price to move. This is why the S&P500 barely moves daily while Bitcoin could swing 5–10% daily.
What about PEPE? Why Can’t it Reach 1$?
PEPE has over 420 Trillion coins. The current MC is $8B. We know this when we multiply the number of coins in circulation by the current price. This means that for PEPE to reach 1$, it needs to have a MC of $420T. The entire MC of the crypto market, which you can get on Tradingview by typing TOTAL in the search bar. This calculates the MC of every crypto asset out there and adds them together.
From this, we conclude that it is unrealistic for PEPE to reach 1$ as its MC would need to be larger than that of the entire market by almost 200 times. This is why investors rely on MC to aim for realistic targets.
Many new investors get fooled by PEPE’s price being so low. They think they will be reach because they own a lot of coins. The truth is, it’s all a numbers game. You will be as rich as the inflows that go into the asset to increase its price. You will lose your money if they don’t match the outflows.
What’s a Realistic Target for PEPE?
How high can PEPE go then? First of all, it’s anybody’s guess. No one can really know how high a certain cryptocurrency or asset can go. But we can make educated guesses. Currently, the MC of PEPE is $8B. If the coin can remain under the spotlight long enough, it can flip SHIBA. SHIBA’s MC currently is $14B, but it can increase in the upcoming weeks. So, we would expect the inflows on PEPE to be higher than SHIBA so that it can eventually catchup. Maybe this could translate to a MC of $16–20B for PEPE, meaning a price increase of at least 100% from here.
Can PEPE go much higher? Yes, it can. But you have to be realistic in your expectations. So far, one of the hardest things in crypto is to try to put a fair value on a meme coin. This is why we can never know how high these coins can run. The best thing to do is to constantly take profits whenever it goes high and get out when you feel it’s extremely overvalued.
I hope you learned something useful today. If you did, don’t forget to give me a follow + join my TG group for further updates on all things crypto.
Why Dogecoin Could Go to 1$ but not PEPE? was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.