PEPE: A Frog Meme That Hit $11 Billion

In mid-April 2023 a trader using the name dimethyltryptamine.eth spent about $263 on a new coin with a green cartoon frog for a logo. Three weeks later he had sold part of his stake for about $3.8 million and still held tokens worth around $9 million, according to blockchain analysts at Arkham cited by CoinDesk. The coin was PEPE, and it had gone from nothing to a market value of more than $1 billion during one of the gloomiest stretches the crypto market had seen, months after the collapse of the exchange FTX.

PEPE is a meme coin: a token with no company, no earnings and no product behind it, only a picture and a joke. Buyers own nothing but the token itself, and its price depends entirely on whether someone else will pay more later. Think of a penny stock with no business attached, traded purely on mood. PEPE made a virtue of this. Its website still says there is "no formal team or roadmap" and that the coin is "completely useless and for entertainment purposes only".

The scale came fast. By early May 2023 PEPE was worth about $1.6 billion. At its peak on 9 December 2024 the token hit roughly $0.000028 and the whole supply was worth about $11 billion, more than some companies in the S&P 500. In mid-October 2026 it traded near $0.0000041, about 85% below that high, for a market value of about $1.7 billion.

A frog borrowed from an artist

The frog belongs to someone. Pepe the Frog was drawn by the American artist Matt Furie for his 2005 comic Boy's Club, a laid-back character whose catchphrase was "feels good, man". The internet adopted him, and by 2016 far-right groups had too; the Anti-Defamation League added a version of the frog to its database of hate symbols that year. Furie spent years fighting misuse of his character, including a copyright case against the conspiracy website Infowars, which settled in 2019.

Furie had nothing to do with the coin. PEPE's own website said it had no association with him or his creation. The people who made money from his drawing were anonymous traders and an anonymous team.

How the coin works

PEPE runs on Ethereum, a blockchain (a shared public ledger, kept by thousands of computers, that records who owns what). It was created by a smart contract, a piece of code that issues and moves tokens by itself, like a share registry that runs without a registrar. The contract minted 420.69 trillion tokens, two numbers chosen as internet jokes, which is why a single PEPE costs a tiny fraction of a cent. A low unit price makes a coin feel cheap even when the total is worth billions, the same trick that makes a stock split look like a bargain.

Trading started on Uniswap, a decentralised exchange where software matches buyers and sellers without a broker. Big exchanges followed within weeks, including KuCoin and Binance. In November 2024 Robinhood and Coinbase, the two US platforms most share traders would recognise, added PEPE on the same day, and the price jumped by around 40% within hours.

Who got hurt

The anonymous team turned out to be the risk. On 24 August 2023 about 16 trillion PEPE, worth roughly $15 million, left a team wallet that needed several signatures to move money, a joint account with several keyholders. The tokens went to the exchanges OKX, Binance, KuCoin and Bybit and were sold. The rule on how many keyholders had to agree was cut from five of eight to two of eight. The one remaining team member said three former colleagues had taken the tokens and then deleted their social accounts. The price fell about 20%. Nobody was named or charged, and the account rests on the project's own word.

Late buyers paid most. Anyone who bought in the excitement of December 2024 had lost around 85% by October 2026. On 4 December 2025 the official PEPE website was hijacked: the security firm Blockaid found code from Inferno Drainer, a known theft kit, planted on the site to empty the crypto wallets of visitors who connected them. The token barely moved. It was already trading about 83% below its peak.

What PEPE proved

PEPE showed that a coin with no story beyond a picture could still pull in billions, even in a falling market. It helped set off the meme coin rush of 2024, when traders piled into dog and cat coins on Solana such as BONK and WIF, and launchpads like Pump.fun began turning out thousands of new tokens a day. Its creators stayed anonymous, its artist stayed unpaid, and the people who made the most money were the ones who bought first and sold to everyone else.