‘Pepe the Frog’ Memecoins Rocket as Crypto Twitter Moves Above Doge Obsession
A pepe token (PEPE) launched on Sunday ran over 21,000% in the past three days, bringing in $30 million in trading volume on Uniswap and reaching a market cap as high as $33 million on Tuesday morning.
“The most memorable memecoin around. The dogs have had their day, it’s time for Pepe to take over,” says the Pepe website.
Pepe hit 10,000 individual holders on Tuesday, data from blockchain tracker Etherscan shows, meaning the token was quickly snapped up by a number of investors joining in on the ongoing frenzy – and pinning hopes of cashing in.
The tokens have a circulating supply of 420 trillion, a reference to ‘4/20’, another popular cannabis culture slang. The trading action is pretty serious for a token that is meant to be a complete joke: a trading pool on Uniswap for Pepe tokens unlocks over $1.3 million in liquidity, all provided by vendors.
As such, the tokens have no connection to the actual Pepe the Frog meme or Matt Furie, the meme’s original creator.
Furie’s Pepe, a green frog with a humanoid body, originated in the 2005 cartoon Boy’s Club. It went viral in the years that followed, becoming a popular part of internet culture.
Crypto Twitter has a knack for jumping on memecoins, mainly following the rise of tokens like dogecoin (DOGE) and shiba inu (SHIB) – which jumped to tens of billions in market cap in the previous bull market.
Anyone can call a smart contract and issue tokens on Ethereum (or other blockchains) for a few cents, and the presence of decentralized exchanges means that tokens can be instantly issued, supplied with liquidity and traded soon after.
Some professional investors have previously told CoinDesk that meme coins and their narratives will always remain part of the crypto ecosystem.
“Meme coins are huge parts of the crypto trading landscape, whether we like it or not,” James Wo, founder of crypto fund DFG, told CoinDesk at the height of such meme obsession. “While the major currencies such as bitcoin and ether have very low volatility, it is only natural that traders will look for opportunities elsewhere.”
“Meme trading is a risky way to try to seek excessive returns, but when it pans out, the upside can be very large. So even in a bear market, some of the meme coins will have a big rebound, even if it’s only short-term, ” Wo explained.
The premise doesn’t matter: whether there is money to be made from dealing with trendy topics; expect a market for it somewhere in niche “s**tcoin” circles.
