First published 18 April 2023, the week the token started trading. Expanded in October 2026 so the supply and the copycats are on the same page. Pepe is an ERC-20 token on Ethereum, branded with the Pepe the Frog cartoon. PEPE is the ticker. There is no Pepe blockchain. There is no staking contract in the token, no fee switch, and no treasury the token governs. The joke is the product. Shiba Inu (SHIB) is a token, not a second Ethereum is the earlier version of this shape. What is Dogecoin (DOGE)? is a meme that at least has its own chain. This one does not.
The cartoon’s creator, Matt Furie, did not issue the token. A picture of the frog is not a licence, and it is not a promise.
What was created
On 14 April 2023 the contract minted the whole supply at once, about 420.69 trillion tokens, a joke number and a real balance. The contract does not mint more. About 93 percent was placed in a Uniswap pool, and the liquidity receipt for that deposit was burned, so the deposit cannot be pulled by the people who made it. About 7 percent sat in a team multisig, described as inventory for listings and liquidity. In August 2023 a large part of that team allocation left the multisig. Public tracing put the coins at exchange deposits. That is a failure of who held the keys. It did not mint new tokens, and it did not unburn the pool receipt.
A unit price with many zeros is what you get when you divide a market by hundreds of trillions of units. It is not a discount. Market cap is price times the supply being counted. Liquidity is whether anyone will buy the amount you hold. Those are different numbers. How to read a crypto headline without getting played still applies when the headline is a frog.
The contract is the object
Wallets will display a copycat that reused the letters PEPE. Bridged copies on other chains are further tokens. Match the contract a long-standing Ethereum explorer has shown since April 2023, on Ethereum, not a ticker in a chat and not a token that arrived uninvited. A verified icon is a directory entry. Ignore surprise tokens. They are often bait that wants an approval. A wallet signature is not a handshake.
There is no claim, no migration, and no “upgrade your PEPE” that the token requires. A site that asks for a recovery phrase to claim Pepe is not claiming anything. Nothing here is an instruction to buy, sell, or hold PEPE.
