The latest craze in the cryptocurrency world is Pepe Coin (PEPE), a meme coin built on the Ethereum blockchain by an anonymous user. Within just three weeks of its launch in April 2023, PEPE’s market capitalisation surpassed $1 billion, reaching the same milestone that took meme coin DOGE four years to achieve. At the time of writing PEPE coin market cap has dropped to $240 million (October 2023).
Despite warnings that Pepe Coin has no inherent value or utility and was created for entertainment purposes only, thousands of investors have purchased it in the hopes of cashing in on its sudden rise.
PEPE’s maximum supply is 420,690,000,000 tokens↗︎, with 93.1% of them in the liquidity pool and the remaining 6.9% allocated to a multi-signature wallet for future use. Pepe Coin employs a deflationary mechanism that burns a small percentage of tokens with each transaction to create scarcity and potentially increase the value of the remaining tokens over time. Additionally, a redistribution system is in place, in which a portion of every transaction gets distributed to existing token holders to encourage user engagement and long-term investments.
The surge of Pepe Coin is frequently linked to several prominent purchases that captured the cryptocurrency community’s attention on social media platforms. Since its launch, Pepe has experienced an extraordinary increase, with its value rising by almost 5,000,000%. The latest meme coin craze has produced several millionaires in the blink of an eye.
Pump the frog!
An anonymous user reportedly earned £3 million in just three weeks after investing £208 in Pepe Coin tokens. Investing in Pepe Coin may appear to be a quick way to make a tidy profit, but there are risks involved. Sudden bag sells by whales could immediately impact prices, and there is no guarantee that investors will be able to convert their assets back to cash when they need to. Traders could end up without anyone to sell to if the coin was to suddenly tank.
As always, investors should do their own research and proceed with caution.
Where can you buy Pepe?
Pepe coin has been listed on several exchanges including Binance, Uniswap, Kukoin, Gemini, and Coinbase. To buy Pepe Coin, investors must have a wallet that enables them to send and receive Ethereum and other ERC-20 tokens.
Who is Pepe the Frog?
Pepe the Frog is a cartoon character created by artist Matt Furie. Pepe was designed as a green anthropomorphic frog with a humanoid body and first appeared in Furie’s 2005 comic Boy’s Club. The character later became a popular meme across various online platforms such as Reddit, Facebook and Twitter.
However, in 2015, political Pepe memes started emerging, which went against Furie’s wishes. These memes were especially popular among the rising ‘far-right’ movement. Towards the end of the same year, Donald Trump retweeted a picture depicting himself as Pepe standing at a US presidential podium.
In 2019, Matt Furie filed a lawsuit against the far-right news website Infowars, seeking to prevent the publication from selling posters featuring Pepe’s image. Furie also wanted to stop the unauthorised use of his character’s image, particularly for commercial gain.
Recently, Furie stated that he was not aware of the Pepe coin but did express his admiration for Dogecoin. It is highly unlikely that Furie can or will take legal action since the identity of Pepe’s creator(s) remains unknown.
