Pepe (PEPE)

Pepe (PEPE) is a meme coin launched on Ethereum in April 2023 and named after Pepe the Frog, the cartoon character created by the artist Matt Furie. It has no stated purpose beyond being traded and shared as an internet joke, and its creators said openly that it had no intrinsic value. Within weeks of launch it became one of the most traded meme coins, and it has remained one of the largest by market value.

PEPE is an ERC-20 token that runs on the Ethereum blockchain; it has no network of its own. It is unrelated to Matt Furie, who did not create or endorse it, and it is a different asset from older tokens that used the same name. It is often compared with Dogecoin (DOGE) and Shiba Inu (SHIB), the earlier dog-themed meme coins.

Pepe is like a novelty badge that went viral. Someone printed an enormous number of badges with a famous internet frog on them, gave almost all of them to a public trading booth, and walked away from the printing press so that no more could be made. From then on, the price of a badge was set only by how many people wanted one.

There is no company, product or income behind the badge. People buy it because they find it funny, because they belong to the online community around it, or because they hope someone else will pay more later. That makes its price swing far more than that of most other crypto assets, and much of its trading is driven by social media.

Pepe the Frog first appeared in 2005 in Matt Furie's comic Boy's Club and became a widely used internet meme. In 2016 its image was taken up by extremist groups, and the Anti-Defamation League added versions of it to its database of hate symbols; Furie objected to that use and drew the character's funeral in a 2017 comic. He had no part in the token.

The PEPE token was launched in mid-April 2023 by an anonymous team, with no presale and no tax on transactions. Its value rose quickly amid a wave of meme-coin trading, and within about three weeks its market value passed 1.6 billion US dollars before falling back; Binance listed it in early May 2023. On 24 August 2023 about 16 trillion PEPE held in the project's multi-sig wallet were sent to several exchanges and sold, and the price fell sharply. The remaining developer blamed three former team members, who he said had removed themselves as signers and deleted their social media accounts, and moved the roughly 10 trillion tokens left to a new wallet. Critics questioned that account, and the episode is often cited in discussions of insider risk in meme coins.

PEPE has a fixed supply of 420,690,000,000,000 tokens, a number chosen as an internet joke. No more can be created because the contract's ownership was renounced. At launch, 93.1 percent of the supply was placed in a liquidity pool on Uniswap and the pool tokens were burned, so the liquidity could not be withdrawn. The other 6.9 percent went to the multi-sig wallet to pay for future exchange listings and bridges. Each share is:

• $T_{\text{share}}$ is the number of tokens in a given share.
• $S$ is the total supply, 420.69 trillion PEPE.
• $p$ is the share of supply, written as a decimal.

For the liquidity pool, $T_{\text{share}} = 420.69 \times 0.931 = 391.66$ trillion PEPE; for the team wallet, $420.69 \times 0.069 = 29.03$ trillion PEPE. Because the supply is so large, a single PEPE is worth a tiny fraction of a cent, and its market capitalization is a better guide to its size than its price.

PEPE trades on decentralized exchanges and on most large centralized exchanges. Its price is driven by social media, influencer posts and broad swings in crypto sentiment rather than by any underlying business. On-chain analysts watch large holders, known as whales, closely, because a few wallets selling at once can move the market. The coin's success encouraged a wave of copycat frog tokens and other meme launches in 2023 and 2024.

Meme coins are generally not treated as securities in the United States, and in February 2025 staff of the Securities and Exchange Commission said that typical meme coins do not fall under federal securities laws; see Howey test for the memecoin. That also means buyers have few investor protections. The main risks are extreme volatility, dependence on online attention, concentration among a small number of holders, and the kind of insider selling seen in August 2023. Meme coins are also a common setting for pump-and-dump schemes and rug pulls, including fake tokens that copy a popular name.

• Pepe
• PEPE token contract on Etherscan