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Matt Furie

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Matt Furie
Matt Furie
Image: no public image; placeholder illustration, memecoin.wiki
rolecartoonist, creator of Pepe the Frog
known forBoy's Club, Pepe, copyright enforcement against frog projects

Matt Furie is the American cartoonist who created Pepe the Frog, the character that became the unlicensed face of PEPE and thousands of frog coins while Furie waged a long copyright campaign over the meme.

Contents
  1. 1 Pepe before the coins
  2. 2 PEPE and the frog coin era
  3. 3 NFT disputes
  4. 4 Position
  5. 5 References

Matt Furie is an American cartoonist who created Pepe the Frog in his 2005 comic Boy's Club, where the character was a laid back stoner frog with the catchphrase "feels good man." His relevance to trench history is unusual: he never launched a coin, yet his frog became the single most important visual asset in meme coin culture, and his copyright fights define the legal gray zone every Pepe derivative trades in.

Pepe before the coins

Pepe escaped Boy's Club and became a general purpose internet meme in the early 2010s, and crypto adopted him early: the Rare Pepe trading card scene on the Counterparty protocol began in 2016, years before the meme coin era. In the same period the character was appropriated by the alt right, and Furie responded with a sustained legal campaign, including DMCA takedowns and a copyright suit against Infowars that reporting by Vice and the SPLC covered in detail. Those cases established that Furie both owns the character and is willing to enforce it.

PEPE and the frog coin era

In April 2023 anonymous developers launched the PEPE token on Ethereum using the frog's likeness. Cointribune reported that the coin was created without Furie's knowledge or permission, and DailyCoin reported that Furie was not a fan of the character's use in blockchain projects. PEPE nonetheless became one of the largest meme coins of the cycle, reaching a multibillion dollar capitalization, and its success seeded an endless population of frog derivatives across the trenches. Furie has not brought a public lawsuit against the PEPE token itself, which analysts have noted leaves the entire frog coin economy running on an asset its creator never licensed.

NFT disputes

Furie's own crypto ventures have been contentious. In August 2021 his DMCA request led OpenSea to delist the Sad Frogs District collection, then valued around 4 million dollars. In 2022 a collector named Halston Thayer sued Furie and PegzDAO over a roughly 500,000 dollar Rare Pepe NFT purchase, alleging the DAO diluted its value by releasing duplicates for free, a case covered by Kotaku. In June 2025 NFT contracts tied to Furie and the studio ChainSaw, including the Replicandy collection, were hijacked by an attacker who minted and dumped tokens for roughly 1 million dollars in losses, according to CryptoSlate.

Position

Furie's stance is the paradox the frog coins live with: the creator polices commercial uses of Pepe selectively and successfully, but the meme itself has proven unownable in practice. Within the trenches his name is invoked whenever a frog project debates whether its art is a tribute or an infringement.

References

Category: People