The Pepe Coin Phenomenon: A Deep Dive into Memecoins
Pepe Coin also known by its market ticker PEPE, is a meme coin with no intrinsic value or expectation of financial return.
There is no formal team or roadmap and the coin is completely useless and for entertainment purposes only, according to its official website.
Pepe was created as a tribute to Pepe the Frog internet meme, a cartoon character designed as a green anthropomorphic frog with a humanoid body and the token currently sits as a top-100 crypto project.
Pepe Coin sees itself as a rival of other popular meme coins, such as Dogecoin and Shiba Inu and aspires to become the leading meme-based cryptocurrency. But can it really succeed?
Let’s find out!
What is Pepe coin?
Pepe is a cryptocurrency created in April 2023 by an anonymous developer and launched on the Ethereum blockchain. This means that Pepe coin is an ERC-2O token but more on that later.
According to its roadmap, there are three main stages, with the last one introducing Pepe merch, new Pepe tools, and a Pepe Academy. The team behind Pepe also hopes to list the token in more crypto exchanges and increase the number of Pepe holders to over 100,000, something they recently accomplished.
Pepe coin made headlines on Twitter when an early investor swapped $250 for 5.9 trillion PEPE tokens, that a few days later were worth more than $1 million, making more and more investors rushing to join this digital meme race in hope of becoming equally wealthy.
The rise of Pepe coin, which as I mentioned earlier is based on Ethereum, has also pushed up the gas fees, as more transactions are happening on the network, causing a temporary congestion.
This led to even more similar meme tokens created on the Bitcoin network, using the BRC-20 token standard, which allows users to create fungible tokens, causing heavy congestion on the Bitcoin network and skyrocketing the transaction fees.
How does Pepe coin work?
As I mentioned earlier, Pepe is an ERC-20 token. An ERC-20 token is basically a blueprint for creating fungible tokens on the Ethereum blockchain. Fungible tokens, unlike non-fungible tokens or NFTs, are identical to each other in value and functionality.
As a result, Ethereum’s network of Proof-of-Stake validators process Pepe Coin’s transactions.
Under Proof-of-Stake, validators are selected randomly to confirm transactions and add new blocks to the blockchain. Once the validation is confirmed, the network rewards the validator with an amount of cryptocurrencies.
Anyone can become a validator as long as they stake, meaning deposit, a minimum amount of tokens to the network. In fact, the algorithm favors validators who are staking more than the others.
To prevent gaming the system, Proof-of-Stake algorithms lock away a portion of the selected validators’ staked tokens in a deposit.
A validator risks losing some of their staked tokens if they caught submitting fraudulent transactions.
Now that we know what Pepe coin is and how it works, let’s find out what makes Pepe unique!
What makes Pepe coin unique?
As I mentioned earlier, Pepe is a memecoin that has no intrinsic value and its price is mostly driven by hype and speculation. However what makes Pepe stand out is the fact that the project honors the controversial character of Pepe the Frog and through that aims to increase its reach in the crypto community.
But how high can PEPE’s price go? And will it eventually flip Dogecoin and Shiba Inu? Let’s find out by exploring its tokenomics.
PEPE tokenomics
As PEPE is an ERC-20 token, all PEPE tokens were created all at once. PEPE has a maximum supply of around 420 trillion tokens.
Of this 420 trillion tokens, 93.1% were sent to the liquidity pool and the rest 6.9% is being held by the development team that’s been reserved for future exchanges, community partnerships, promotions and similar uses.
A liquidity pool is essentially where a group of token holders pool their funds together to create a “pool” of money. They do this to achieve varying rewards, usually some tokens and a percentage of the transaction fees. As a result, decentralized markets can stay open 24/7 as they do not need to wait for both buyers and sellers to participate as there is already a reserve of crypto to trade from – the liquidity pool.
Pepe calls this redistribution system and distributes a portion of every transaction to existing token holders, encouraging user engagement and long-term investments.
This is a very basic explanation of how liquidity Pools and Automated Market Makers work.
However if you would like to learn more about that, click here.
Additionally, to maintain scarcity and drive value appreciation, Pepe implements a couple of deflationary mechanisms.
One such mechanism is token burning, where a portion of tokens from the liquidity pool is permanently removed from circulation. This reduction in the total supply over time creates a deflationary pressure, potentially increasing the value of each Pepe Coin.
Finally, the project also introduces “no taxes” policy. Meaning that there are no excessive gas fees associated with trading PEPE tokens and thus keeping the transaction fees to the minimum.
Understanding the Memecoin Revolution
In conclusion, although Pepe was initially created as a tribute to Pepe the Frog internet meme with very light fundamentals, its early success has been undeniable.
Pepe’s quick rise to top-50 crypto projects is often linked to a few high-profile purchases that got the attention of the crypto community on Twitter and other social media sites.
Even though we can’t know what will happen in the future or how long this hype will last, it seems likely that Pepe coin will be here longer than most other meme coins and the chances of surpassing Dogecoin’s and Shiba Inu’s market cap, are high.
Thanks for reading, if you like the article on Pepe coin, read the article on Dogecoin or Shiba Inu.