PepePEPE

Pepe launched on Ethereum in April 2023 as a stealth-deployed memecoin built around the Pepe the Frog character created by Matt Furie. The contract was deployed without a presale, with the entire 420.69 trillion supply minted at launch and the team renouncing minting rights immediately afterward. Liquidity was burned at deployment, eliminating the most common rug-pull vector.

The first three months produced one of the fastest holder-curve climbs in memecoin history — peaking near 200,000 unique addresses within sixty days — and a market cap that briefly crossed $1.5B. Pepe became the reference asset for the 2023 memecoin cycle, attracting trader rotation out of Doge and Shiba Inu and inspiring dozens of derivative launches across Ethereum, Solana, and Base.

A governance dispute in August 2023 saw three of the original eight multisig signers move roughly 16 trillion tokens out of the treasury wallet. The remaining team published a multisig-rotation post-mortem and the project recovered, though the incident remains the single largest trust event in Pepe’s history. Today the supply remains uncapped at the original 420.69T, with deep secondary liquidity across Binance, Coinbase, OKX, and on-chain markets, and ongoing community development coordinated through the @pepecoineth account.