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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 Cultural impact
  4. 4 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

PEPE launched in mid April 2023 with a supply of 420.69 trillion tokens, no transaction taxes, a renounced contract, and no pretense of utility. Its website described it as the most memeable meme coin in existence, arguing that the dog coin era of Dogecoin and Shiba Inu had run its course and that the internet's most recognizable frog deserved its turn. 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.

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. Binance listed the token on May 5, 2023, an unusually fast listing that legitimized the mania. After a long consolidation, PEPE rode the 2024 bull market to an all time high of about 0.000028 dollars on December 9, 2024, 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. By August 2026 aggregators placed its market capitalization near 1.1 billion dollars, down roughly 90 percent from the peak but still among the largest meme coins on any chain.

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. In trench history it marks the dividing line between the dog coin cycles of 2021 and the internet culture coins that followed.

References

Category: Coins