Inserting itself between predominantly dog-inspired meme tokens, Pepe (PEPE) took April by storm. PEPE’s price rose by over 3,800% in two weeks, becoming the third-largest memecoin. What’s happening with the token, and is there more to the hype?

What is the Pepe (PEPE) Token?

Anonymously launched on April 14th as an ERC-20 token, Pepe is yet another memecoin driven by the popularity of internet memes. Just as real-world assets (RWA) can be tokenized, seemingly so can popular culture, but in a more speculative form. Pepe took this mantle, now sandwiched between Shiba Inu and FLOKI, at a market cap of $447.6 million among ~75,000 holders.

Although still firmly behind the memecoin king DOGE, at a $10.9 billion market cap, Pepe has become the third largest meme token. Such abrupt reshuffling of popularity is indicative of this cryptocurrency niche. Investors take a lighthearted approach, always driven by novelty and cultural significance.

This makes memecoin trading akin to tokenized gambling, which typically yields wild price volatility.

As this is also the token’s maximum supply, Pepe has no pre-sale, token unlocks, or emission schedule. Although such an enormous supply makes each Pepe cost a fraction of a cent, this also means that Pepe is deflationary.

Case in point, Elon Musk’s favorite, Dogecoin, has an annual issuance rate of 5 billion DOGE. Therefore, it has no maximum supply. Although DOGE’s inflation rate will gradually decrease to approximately 2.5% by 2035, it will always be an inflationary coin. Accordingly, DOGE will become less valuable unless its demand outpaces the inflation rate, which is not likely.

On this basis alone, Pepe’s fixed token supply makes it a more competitive meme token. The question is, how valuable is its cultural significance?

Pepe’s Origins and Value Potential

Before anyone heard of cryptocurrencies, cartoon artist Matt Furie created the humanoid frog character in his comic book “Boy’s Club,” in 2005. However, it took 4chan meme-making to push Pepe the Frog into the mainstream. Pepe has made appearances across a wide range of subcultures, but in the late 2010s, Pepe became associated with the alt-right.

Specifically with the presidential campaign of Donald J. Trump. Out of all personalities Pepe took, this made it the most pervasive one as a counter-cultural emblem. Now as a token, Pepe’s mocking, ironic, and satirical manner is geared against dog coins.

From this perspective, Pepe the Frog appears to be a more cutting and flexible meme than the Doge family of memecoins. At the same time, Pepe lacks the centralizing figure like Elon Musk, to whom Dogecoin owes much of its popularity. Moreover, out of ~75,000 Pepe holders, only ten wallets hold 20% of the token’s supply.

As anonymous as it is, this makes Pepe a relatively centralized coin, with few whales able to exert considerable buy or sell pressures. Following the airdrops, the aforementioned multi-sig pepecexwallet.eth holds 6.9% of the total supply. The Pepe team, at pepe.vip, plans to use this Pepe token trove for future CEX listings, cross-chain bridges, and liquidity pools.

Does Pepe Have a Roadmap?

At press time, Pepe has accrued nearly 152,000 Twitter followers on its official account, @pepecoineth. On Telegram, it has the same moniker but just over 28,000 subscribers. Given its officially stated goals, Pepe completed phase 1, centered around holder growth and social media trending.

The following two phases aim to supplant other memecoins through community partnerships and increase the coin’s social utility. The official page clearly states that Pepe has no formalized team or roadmap, describing the token as “completely useless and for entertainment purposes only.”

Nonetheless, framing things unseriously is the hallmark of the Pepe the Frog meme. This itself may lend it more meme magic power.

This article originally appeared on The Tokenist

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