Onboarding Notes: $Pepe

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Even if you’ve been crypto inactive during the past few weeks, you must have seen this frog meme on your Twitter timeline.

This legendary Pepe Frog is the meme that drove life-changing wealth for some, while capturing the attention of all crypto enthusiasts.

From a meme, to a coin, to a movement surpassing the $1 billion market capitalisation at one point, here’s the story of $Pepe.

The Beginnings

The concept of $Pepe is simple and straightforward:

Make memecoins great again by using the most recognisable meme in the world, Pepe the Frog.

First, some context to the Pepe the Frog.

This meme was created by cartoonist Matthew Furie close to 20 years ago. You can find out more about its origins here:

Or even watch his documentary, Feels Good Man here:

Fast forward to today, Pepe the Frog has become one of the most recognisable memes in internet culture.

We see it widely used in memes all over the internet, from the early days of the internet forums and now all over Twitter and social media.

Here’s how holychurchofpepe puts it:

“Pepe is the embodiment of the internet. The internet is the embodiment of people. People from all backgrounds, cultures, and financial situations. There is a Pepe for every emotion, and Pepe's journey through adversity to becoming a symbol of hope and love is one that we can all resonate with or aspire to.”

The Launch

On April 14th, the $Pepe memecoin launched to huge success.

Its holder base and market capitalisation rose at a rapid, unprecedented pace.

Soon enough, stories of early holders turning into millionaires started flooding the Twitter timelines.

These stories and memes caught the attention of all of Crypto Twitter, trending all over Twitter and even other mainstream media platforms.

Memes started surfacing all over as huge, early returns got early supporters thrilled and made posts in support of the project.

We even started seeing ‘utility’ and recognition for the coin, as notable platforms like Manifold and Opensea Pro started accepting $Pepe as a form of payment.

In crypto, narrative is everything.

With the widely adored memecoin coupled with stories of generational wealth, all the attention was on $Pepe.

This also sparked an insane memecoin season, with Pepe derivatives and other new memecoins rallying all week long.

The Explosion

While the memecoin was gaining popularity and widespread attention across all of crypto, it was initially only popular among crypto degens and active users.

It was not until its name started spreading towards a larger group of users, that its price continued to have a parabolic rise.

With the coin grabbing the attention of the entirety of the crypto space, large centralised exchanges also started to list the coin, giving it even more awareness to all crypto users.

Binance

Gemini

Prices continued to jump in multiples. Trading volume of the project had a similar rise to cryptocurrencies at the the top of the ranks.

Artist Beeple also joined in the fun, making multiple posts about $Pepe and the memecoin season in general:

The Future

Here comes my favourite part of the article: Where does $Pepe go from here?

Before I can attempt to answer this question, we need to first acknowledge that:

1) Memecoins are highly speculative and are essentially ‘digital lottery tickets’, and

2) the crypto space feeds on attention and narratives in the short run.

Memecoins as lottery tickets

One way to look at memecoins is that they are essentially digitally native, younger and more exciting versions of lottery tickets.

Folks familiar in the crypto scene are well aware that crypto, in its current phase, is somewhat a large casino.

Many participants enter to see the number go up, and memecoins are no different.

Despite sounding unpleasant, using memecoins as a lottery ticket use case is valid, and has huge potential.

In the US alone, the country spent $74 billion on lottery tickets in 2022.

If crypto users view memecoins as yet another lottery ticket and treat them as such, this opens up a multi-billion dollar use case for crypto.

As the biggest and most well known memecoin by far, this suggests that $Pepe will have its staying power in the long run.

Memecoins as culture

On the other hand, simply using memecoins as a lottery ticket can be rather uninspiring.

As with lottery tickets in general, most participants will lose, and memecoins will be nothing more than a token name and contract.

The rare memecoins that succeed are those that manage to rally a cult community and culture behind them (see: Doge).

With Pepe, we see many participants come together to rally behind a token, spread new memes, create new forms of media and generally identify as a proud member of the community.

Whether this persists over time alongside the peaks and troughs of price action remains to be seen.

However, amongst the memecoins today, it is apparent that Pepe is the coin with the strongest community and culture so far.

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