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Pepe

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Pepe
Pepe
Image: token logo via CoinGecko / DexScreener listings
tickerPEPE
blockchainEthereum
launchedApril 2023
peak market capabout 11 billion dollars (December 2024)

Pepe is a frog themed meme coin launched on Ethereum in April 2023 that became the largest pure meme coin of its era, peaking at about 11 billion dollars in December 2024.

Contents
  1. 1 Origin
  2. 2 Market history
  3. 3 Drama and controversies
  4. 4 Cultural impact
  5. 5 References

Pepe is a meme coin on Ethereum based on Pepe the Frog, the cartoon amphibian created by artist Matt Furie. Launched in April 2023 by anonymous developers, it revived the meme coin market after a long bear market and became the benchmark against which later frog coins in the trenches are measured.

Origin

The account @PepeCoinETH first surfaced on April 4, 2023 with a Pepe graphic wearing a Trump campaign style hat reading "Make Memecoins Great Again," then went silent until April 14, 2023, when it launched a website, Telegram channel, and the full token with a supply of 420.69 trillion tokens, no transaction taxes, a renounced contract, and no pretense of utility, positioning itself explicitly as the successor to the dog coin cycle of Dogecoin and Shiba Inu. About 93.1 percent of the supply was deposited into Uniswap liquidity pools with the LP tokens burned and contract ownership renounced. Community retrospectives years later still describe it the same way: "no presale, no dev wallet, no roadmap, just one line: the most memeable memecoin in existence" (lfg_land, August 20, 2025). The project has no affiliation with Matt Furie, who created Pepe the Frog in his 2005 comic Boy's Club. The character's long history, from webcomic mascot to ubiquitous imageboard reaction image, gave the token instant cultural recognition.

PEPE's crypto lineage predates the 2023 token by seven years and is a distinct, unrelated history: in September 2016 an anonymous user called "Mike" minted the first "Rare Pepe" trading cards on the Counterparty protocol atop the Bitcoin blockchain, eventually growing into a 1,774 card collection curated by volunteer "Rare Pepe Scientists" and its own companion asset, PepeCash. Individual Rare Pepe cards have since resold for upward of 600,000 dollars, but the project has no connection to the 2023 PEPE token.

Market history

PEPE went vertical within weeks of launch, reaching a market capitalization of about 1.6 billion dollars in early May 2023 and minting a wave of new millionaires from tiny entries; CoinDesk covered it crossing the 1 billion dollar mark within about three weeks of the April 14 launch. Binance listed the token on May 5, 2023, in its Innovation Zone alongside FLOKI, charging zero BNB in listing fees; PEPE set a fresh record high about 40 minutes after the listing went live, an unusually fast listing that legitimized the mania. After a long consolidation, PEPE rode the 2024 bull market toward its December 2024 peak. On November 13, 2024, Coinbase and Robinhood both listed PEPE within about an hour of each other, following more than 18 months of community requests for the Coinbase listing specifically; the dual listing news sent PEPE up roughly 42 to 52 percent to a then new all time high near 0.0000193 dollars, weeks before its final top. PEPE's all time high landed on December 9, 2024 at a price reported between about 0.0000280 and 0.0000284 dollars depending on the exchange, a market capitalization of roughly 11 billion dollars that briefly flipped Uniswap and put a pure meme coin into the top 20 cryptocurrencies.

The token then retraced through 2025 alongside the broader meme complex. As of August 2026, PEPE traded around 0.0000026 dollars with a market capitalization of about 1.09 to 1.13 billion dollars, ranked roughly 64th among all cryptocurrencies. On August 5, 2026, Santiment data showed a very large volume of PEPE tokens leaving centralized exchanges in a single day, the largest such outflow since November 2024, with analysts reading it as whales and long term holders moving into self custody; the top 100 wallets grew their combined holdings by more than 6 percent over the prior 30 days to about 86 trillion tokens.

Drama and controversies

In an unrelated May 11, 2023 flap, Coinbase publicly apologized after a company newsletter item linking a Pepe coin listing consideration to racist internet symbols drew backlash, with the exchange's chief legal officer Paul Grewal issuing the apology. Matt Furie said during a Twitter Spaces conversation in May 2023 that he had not heard of the trending Pepecoin and joked he was actually "a Dogecoin maxi"; he has never endorsed the token, received any share of its proceeds, or been shown in verifiable reporting to have filed a lawsuit specifically against the PEPE cryptocurrency, a claim that circulates online but that could not be substantiated. Contemporaneous reporting instead described Matt Furie as retaining, but not exercising, several legal avenues to come after the Pepe token, including the DMCA takedown power he had used against a 4 million dollar Pepe NFT collection in August 2021.

On August 25, 2023, the PEPE team's multisignature wallet, which had required five of eight signers to move funds, was quietly reconfigured to require only two of eight signers, then used to transfer more than 16 trillion PEPE tokens, worth about 15 to 17 million dollars, to four exchanges. The price fell roughly 15 to 17 percent within a day, three of the four founding developers exited the project and deleted their social media accounts, and the team blamed "nefarious ex team members." Crypto figure Jeremy "Pauly" Cahen, founder of NFT project Not Larva Labs and once a PEPE promoter himself, publicly doxxed Zachary Testa, described as a landscape photographer, as the alleged founder behind the dumped wallet, accusing him of buying an 865,000 dollar purple Lamborghini with PEPE proceeds while giving nothing to Matt Furie; PEPE's price fell about 19 to 20 percent within 24 hours of the doxx. Later allegations in December 2025 claimed a single wallet holding about 30 percent of PEPE's initial supply sold roughly 2 million dollars worth of tokens, reigniting doubts about how "fair" the original fair launch actually was.

On October 22, 2024, the SEC's Division of Enforcement issued a Wells Notice to Eric Wallace, described as one of the individuals involved in creating and developing the PEPE memecoin, stating its staff had preliminarily determined to recommend an enforcement action over the August 2023 transfer of about 4 percent of PEPE's supply to development team members, alleging violations of the Securities Exchange Act and Securities Act. Wallace denied wrongdoing and disputed that PEPE qualifies as a security. No final resolution of the matter has been reported, so its outcome remains unresolved rather than closed.

PEPE's success spawned direct copycats beyond the general derivative wave the project inspired: Wall Street Pepe (WEPE) drew scrutiny after on chain records showed close to its full 199.46 billion token supply had been minted and distributed far beyond what was advertised, its advertised 32 percent staking yield was quietly shut down within months, and fraudulent lookalike websites and airdrop drainers targeted its investors separately from the project's own issues.

Cultural impact

PEPE proved that a meme coin with zero utility, zero taxes, and a fair launch could outperform nearly every venture backed token of its cycle, a lesson that shaped the pump.fun era on Solana. It restored frogs to the center of crypto meme culture, spawned thousands of derivatives including Apu Apustaja and countless Pepe variants, and made the phrase "PEPE season" shorthand for meme coin mania. PEPE is still routinely cited in trench discussion as a benchmark blue chip meme alongside DOGE, SHIB, and WIF; a June 2026 thread called it the standard other memes are measured against, "everyone knows there must be a $wojak meme in the billions, its bigger than $pepe bigger than them all" (MarcellxMarcell, June 20, 2026). In trench history it marks the dividing line between the dog coin cycles of 2021 and the internet culture coins that followed.

References

See also
  • PINK COIN PINK COIN ($PINK) is a Solana memecoin launched on pump.fun on August 28, 2026 as a self d
  • Pippin Pippin is a Solana AI agent token built around a stick figure unicorn created by BabyAGI a
  • Pistacio Pistacio ($Pistacio) is a Solana memecoin deployed on pump.fun on August 25, 2026, 47 minu
  • PONKE PONKE is a Solana meme coin fronted by an angry cartoon monkey styled as a degenerate gamb
  • Pons Pons ($PONS) is the token of Pons.family, the dominant memecoin launchpad on Robinhood Cha
Category: Coins
Last updated 2026-08-21