Fact Checked by 
What is Pepe Coin?
Pepe Coin ($PEPE) is a popular meme coin built on the Ethereum blockchain. Shortly after its public launch in April 2023, Pepe Coin became one of the most highly-traded cryptocurrencies.
To provide some perspective, Dogecoin (DOGE) took almost four years for its market capitalization to surpass $1 billion. In contrast, Pepe Coin reached the same benchmark within three weeks of its launch. Although the price of $PEPE has been extremely volatile since then, the number of individual holders continues to be impressive.
The Pepe Coin official website says that $PEPE has no intrinsic value or expectation of financial return.
Unofficially, however, over a hundred thousand investors have purchased $PEPE on Binance and other major crypto exchanges.
How Pepe Coin Works
$PEPE has a maximum supply of 420,690,000,000 tokens. At the time of launch, 93.1% of the project’s tokens were in a liquidity pool, and the remaining 6.9% were allocated to a multi-signature wallet for future use.
Pepe Coin was originally designed to use a deflationary mechanism that burns a small percentage of tokens with each transaction. This was intended to create scarcity and hopefully increase the value of remaining tokens over time.
At the time of launch, project team members also implemented a redistribution system that allowed a portion of every transaction to be distributed to existing token holders. This feature was intended to foster user engagement and encourage long-term investments.
Since then, there have been some changes to the project, and it is not yet clear whether the redistribution system will be continued.
Project Changes
In August 2023, the Pepe Coin community became concerned when 16 Trillion $PEPE tokens (worth roughly $15m USD) were inexplicably transferred from the project’s multi-signature wallet to a number of centralized exchanges.
When the news got picked up by the media, the price of the meme coin dropped significantly, and project community members on social media sites expressed concerns about $PEPE’s future.
In response, someone with access to the project’s official X account posted an explanation for the mysterious transfers. Presumably, the explanation was intended to reassure project community members that all was well. The post had the opposite effect, however, and ended up raising even more concerns.
According to the post, disgruntled developers on the Pepe Coin team were responsible for logging into the project’s multi-signature wallet and transferring tokens. The developers, who have since left the project, claimed they were “updating” the wallet.
The person in charge of the project’s X account, however, made it clear that the ex-developers were thieves; they stole the tokens and sold them.
In September, the price of Pepe Coin continued to drop in spite of reassurances that the remaining tokens in the multi-sig wallet were safe and under the control of “someone who has the best interests of everybody and the remaining $PEPE at hand.”
In October, the official Pepe Coin X account shared that a new team of advisors would guide the project forward. The post began with an announcement that 6.9 trillion $PEPE tokens worth approximately $6,000,000 had been burned and permanently removed from the project’s supply.
The token burn reduced the overall supply of $PEPE tokens. This, along with the announcement about new advisors, sent investors signals that the project was still under active development and drove up the price of $PEPE.
Pepe Coin Vs. Pepe Coin 2.0
Pepe 2.0 is a meme coin that is rumored to have been created by individuals who were blacklisted by the original Pepe Coin project. Officially, Pepe Coin and Pepe 2.0 are competitors, and the two projects have nothing to do with each other.
Unlike the original Pepe Coin, which is tax-free, Pepe 2.0 transactions carry a 1% transaction tax. The tax is supposed to be used by Pepe 2.0’s developers for marketing, liquidity, and community development purposes.
The Future of Pepe Coin
Pepe Coin’s rapid rise to prominence is often attributed to several high-profile purchases that caught the attention of the cryptocurrency community on social media sites, especially Twitter.
The Pepe Coin roadmap at the time of launch had three phases: The first phase would focus on launching the coin and promoting it through Twitter. The second phase would focus on community partnerships and getting listed on Tier 1 centralized cryptocurrency exchanges (CEXes).
The third phase would establish a Pepe Academy and promote Pepe merchandise.
The latest roadmap also has three phases, but the focus of each phase is much more vague. The new first phase is “Meme,” the new second phase is “Vibe and HODL,” and the new third phase is “Meme Takeover.”
How to Purchase Pepe Coin
In order to purchase Pepe Coin, investors need to set up a Metamask wallet (or another wallet that can send and receive Ethereum and other ERC-20 tokens) and connect the wallet to Uniswap. Once the wallet is connected, the user will be able to swap ETH for $PEPE.
It is important to note, however, that investing in Pepe Coin comes with risks. It’s possible that a small number of investment whales are still holding large amounts of this altcoin.
History of Pepe the Frog
Pepe the Frog is a cartoon character that was created by artist Matt Furie for his comic book “Boy’s Club,” which was first published in 2005. Pepe, who was characterized as a peaceful and good-natured frog, became a popular internet meme and was widely shared across various social media platforms.
During the 2016 U.S. presidential election, however, the character was co-opted by various online communities and used in numerous memes that spread hate speech, racist ideologies, and other forms of discriminatory content. In response, Furie partnered with the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) to reclaim the character’s original, more positive context through various means, including a “Save Pepe” campaign.
Although Matt Furie has the legal right to seek compensation for any commercial use of his creation, he does not appear to be actively pursuing copyright claims against the creators of Pepe Coin at this time.
