What is Pepe coin? The frog token with no team and no roadmap

What is Pepe coin? The short answer

Pepe coin is a meme token named after Pepe the Frog. Its full name is Pepe and its ticker is PEPE. It lives on Ethereum as a standard ERC-20 token at the contract 0x6982508145454Ce325dDbE47a25d4ec3d2311933. There is no app, no blockchain of its own, no staking scheme and no company behind it. What you get is a fixed supply of 420.69 trillion tokens and a very loud, very online community. Since November 2024 you also get listings on almost every major exchange.

That honesty is part of the brand. The official site, pepe.vip, says PEPE has “no intrinsic value or expectation of financial return” and that there is no formal team or roadmap. Most crypto projects promise the world. PEPE promises nothing, and some traders find that weirdly refreshing.

So when people ask what a Pepe meme coin is, the honest answer is a tradable joke with real liquidity. On 13 October 2026 CoinGecko listed its market cap at about $1.7 billion, ranking it around #61 of all crypto assets and third among meme coins after Dogecoin and Shiba Inu. For the current number, the live PEPE price page has it.

Name / ticker

Pepe / PEPE

Type

ERC-20 token on Ethereum

Deployed

14 April 2023

Supply

420.69 trillion (fixed, no minting)

Contract owner

Renounced (zero address)

Buy/sell tax

None in the contract code

Team / roadmap

Anonymous, none

Official site

pepe.vip

Pepe coin origin and meaning

The token borrows the face of one of the internet’s oldest memes. Pepe the Frog was drawn by artist Matt Furie for his comic Boy’s Club, usually dated to 2005. Over the next decade he escaped the comic and became a reaction image for every emotion: “feels good man”, Sad Pepe, Smug Pepe, and the “Rare Pepes” that people traded as jokes long before NFTs existed. Crypto culture adopted him early, so a frog token was always going to happen.

PEPE arrived in spring 2023, when meme coins were coming back after a long bear market. The pitch was simple. It was a meme coin for people tired of dog coins, with a famous frog, a silly supply number, no taxes and no presale (as the website claims). The name means nothing deeper than that. Pepe coin’s meaning is the meme itself, and the token is a way to bet on (or just join) the attention around it.

It worked fast. Its all-time low of $0.000000055 came on 17 April 2023, just after trading began. Within roughly three weeks the market cap had reached about $1.5 billion. Binance added it to its Innovation Zone on 5 May 2023, warning in its notice that the token had no utility and that insiders appeared to have bought about 7% of supply within minutes of creation. The full rollercoaster since then is on the PEPE price history page.

Who created Pepe coin, and who owns it?

This is the most searched question about PEPE, and the true answer is unsatisfying: nobody publicly knows who created Pepe coin. There is no named founder, CEO or foundation. The team has stayed anonymous since day one, and the website says there is no formal team at all.

What we can see is the on-chain trail. The contract was deployed on 14 April 2023 at 14:51 UTC by an address that Etherscan labels “Pepe: Deployer”. That wallet was funded from a Bybit hot wallet, which means someone withdrew ETH from Bybit to pay for the launch. It doesn’t identify a person, and you should be sceptical of anyone online who claims to have unmasked the Pepe coin founder.

The “team” only became visible once, during a messy episode in August 2023. About 16 trillion PEPE left the project’s multisig wallet and went to exchanges. The remaining members then said three “former founding team members” had made the transfers without permission and vanished. In October 2023 the remaining holder burned 6.9 trillion tokens. Both events are covered in detail in our PEPE tokenomics breakdown.

As for who owns Pepe coin today, the answer has two parts. Nobody owns the contract: ownership was renounced to the zero address, so no admin key can change balances or rules. The tokens themselves are spread across about 594,000 holder addresses (Etherscan, 13 October 2026). The largest of these are exchange wallets such as Binance, OKX and Bybit holding coins for their customers.

Is Pepe coin US based? No. With no company there is no headquarters and no country. It is an anonymous token that runs on Ethereum. The US link is just that many Americans trade it on Coinbase and Robinhood, which both listed PEPE on 13 November 2024.

Matt Furie and the frog: who is (not) involved

Matt Furie created the frog. He did not create the coin, and nothing we found shows he endorses it. In a May 2023 Twitter Spaces he reportedly asked “What is Pepe coin?” and joked that he was a Dogecoin maxi, as Benzinga reported. The PEPE website states plainly that the coin has no association with him or his creation.

Furie has defended his rights to the character before. He had a Pepe NFT collection taken down from OpenSea in 2021 and reached a settlement with Infowars in 2019. We found no legal action against the PEPE token specifically. The issue still matters enough that Canary Capital’s ETF filing at the SEC lists the lack of a licence to the character as a risk factor.

How the token works under the hood

Technically PEPE is one of the simplest tokens you can buy. It is a standard ERC-20 contract with 18 decimals. Every transfer is an Ethereum transaction, so you pay gas in ETH, and you can hold it in any Ethereum wallet. Our PEPE wallets guide walks through MetaMask, Trust Wallet, Ledger and the rest.

The code has no buy or sell tax, no automatic burn, and no way to mint new coins. It does contain two owner-only switches, a blacklist function and a holding-limit rule. Before you panic, read the next bit: because ownership is renounced, those functions can no longer be called by anyone. Anyone can call a public burn function, but it only destroys their own tokens.

At launch, 93.1% of supply went into the Uniswap liquidity pool and 6.9% went to a multisig meant for exchange listings and bridges. About 99.4% of the Uniswap LP tokens now sit locked inside the PEPE contract itself, where no function can move them. The exact split between circulating and max supply, and why CoinGecko and CoinMarketCap show different numbers, is explained on the tokenomics page.

What is Pepe coin used for, and why do people buy it?

Strip away the jokes and PEPE has three real uses. Each is more modest than the hype suggests.

1. A liquid bet on meme sentiment

PEPE is one of the most-traded meme coins in the world. On 13 October 2026 CoinGecko showed roughly $287 million of 24-hour volume. That depth means traders can move in and out quickly, so PEPE often becomes the go-to trade when meme coins are hot. It also tends to fall harder when they are not.

2. A cultural badge

For many holders, a small PEPE bag is like owning a band T-shirt. You join the frens on X and you are in on the joke. That feeling is a real reason people buy, even if it isn’t a financial one.

3. An ERC-20 that plugs into Ethereum

Because it is a standard token, PEPE works on decentralised exchanges like Uniswap, in many wallets and in some lending and perpetuals markets. That is utility in the plumbing sense. The token itself does not do anything.

If you are deciding whether to join, the practical steps are on our how to buy PEPE guide, and the PEPE exchanges comparison shows where it trades and in which currencies.

Want a tiny slice of frog culture?Start small and use a regulated exchange. Check the official contract before you withdraw anything.

Get your PEPE

What PEPE can’t do (and what it isn’t)

Knowing the limits protects you from the hype. PEPE pays no dividends, gives no voting rights and does not secure a network. No one is working to make it “worth” more, because no one is officially working on it at all. Its price comes only from supply and demand, which means attention, liquidity and the wider crypto cycle.

The regulatory picture is a little clearer than it used to be. On 27 February 2025 the SEC’s Division of Corporation Finance said in a staff statement that typical meme coin transactions do not involve the offer and sale of securities. It is non-binding staff guidance and does not name PEPE, but it describes coins exactly like this one. Fraud around meme coins is still illegal, and that rule protects buyers.

Put bluntly, PEPE can go to zero and has no floor except other people’s interest. The is PEPE safe page walks through contract risk and market risk separately. It helps to keep the two apart.

PEPE is not Pepecoin (PEP)

One last thing trips people up constantly. “Pepecoin” written as one word can mean three different assets. There is PEPE, the 2023 Ethereum token on this page. There is Pepecoin (PEP), a separate mineable proof-of-work blockchain launched in 2024. And there is PepeCoin (PEPECOIN), an older 2016 project that later moved to Ethereum and is now linked to BasedAI. They have different supplies, wallets and markets. Our PEPE vs Pepecoin comparison untangles them side by side.

• Ticker is PEPE (not PEP or PEPECOIN)
• Network is Ethereum (or a known bridged copy)
• Contract ends in …2311933
• You found the address on Etherscan or CoinGecko, not in a DM

Run through that list every time you buy on a new app or swap on a DEX. It takes thirty seconds, and it is the cheapest insurance in meme-coin land.