Bitcoin rise getting more Filipinos into crypto

MANILA, Philippines — Filipinos have been buying up meme coins like Dogecoin, Shiba Inu and Pepe amid the overall strong appetite for cryptocurrency, thanks to Bitcoin recently reaching as high as P4 million in value per token.

Coins.ph CEO Wei Zhou, in an interview with the Inquirer, said local traders have shown interest toward the highly speculative crypto tokens to make some quick profits.

Recently, the meme coin transactions in the company’s trading platform had accounted for about 25 percent of the trading volume, a significant uptick from just less than 5 percent in the past year.

Coins.ph, a crypto exchange regulated by the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas, was launched in 2014. It is the first company of its kind in Asia to secure both virtual currency and electronic money issuer licenses from a central bank.

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Meme coins, meanwhile, are volatile cryptocurrency tokens based on internet memes, which refer to any digital content that usually goes viral online because of its humor.

Pricing lure buyers

“One of the reasons why I think Filipinos love meme coins is that they’re priced very low,” he said, making them accessible to traders with smaller wallets.

These tokens are priced around P5 to P10 each, he noted. At this price point, traders are encouraged to buy in big volume to receive better payoff when prices pick up.

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But Zhou stressed that these tokens’ prices are volatile, which means traders must always monitor their movement in the market to optimize profits.

“If it is a pure speculative token, make sure to take profit,” he said, noting that some traders tend to forget to sell when prices have already gone up.

One of the popular meme tokens is Dogecoin, whose price has increased by about 25 percent in the past seven days. Pepe and Shiba Inu, meanwhile, have surged by about 59 percent and 11 percent, respectively, in the same period.

Globally, the market capitalization for top meme tokens rose by 7 percent to $65.52 billion as of writing.