TL;DR

• PENGU briefly entered the top 100 cryptocurrencies club with a market cap of just south of $900 million.
• Over the past week, it outperformed the leading meme coins, Dogecoin (DOGE) and Shiba Inu (SHIB), which are also well in the green.

Rising Through the Ranks

The meme coin sector is notorious for its enhanced volatility. Tokens of that type often stun the community by registering steep price declines or whopping surges in a short period of time. One asset that recently experienced a solid increase is Pudgy Penguins (PENGU).

The Solana-based meme coin saw its valuation skyrocketing by roughly 160% in the past seven days, climbing to a local top of $0.014 today (April 28).

PENGU’s market cap briefly exceeded $880 million, thus positioning the asset among the top 100 cryptocurrencies. Later, the capitalization retraced to around $815 million, causing the coin to drop out of the elite club. 

The exact catalyst behind PENGU’s rally over the past week remains unclear, though it likely stems from a combination of several factors. Those include the resurgence of the entire cryptocurrency market, the overall bullish sentiment among industry participants, and the recent celebration of World Penguin Day.

The event is celebrated every year on April 25 and aims to raise awareness about the flightless birds and the threats they face, such as climate change, overfishing, and habitat destruction. It may have spurred speculative interest in penguin-themed assets like PENGU, contributing to its price rally.

The community quickly picked up the price rally, with analysts predicting a further surge to a $1 billion market cap.

Breakout on $PENGU confirmed

We called the fucking bottom, never fade OG projects

Our way is clear towards $1B MC

PENGU is the mascot and face of crypto

Fuel zee bags⛽️ https://t.co/yCYFHFJAyD pic.twitter.com/rO43oPqIZA

— fuel (@fuelkek) April 28, 2025

Outperforming the Big Names

Although all of the top 10 meme coins have posted impressive gains over the past week, none of them can match PENGU’s explosive performance for that timeframe.

The largest meme in terms of market capitalization – Dogecoin (DOGE) – is currently worth around $0.18, representing an 11% rise on a seven-day scale. 

Shiba Inu (SHIB) is trading at roughly $0.00001396, a 10% weekly increase. The next down the list are PEPE (+15%), TRUMP (+84%), BONK (+66%), and others.

The market cap of the meme coin niche has spiked above $61 billion, which is a serious uptrend compared to the sub-$40 billion level observed at the start of the month. However, it remains far from the peak of over $120 billion witnessed towards the end of 2024.