Pepe (PEPE)

Pepe, in simple terms

Pepe is the third largest memecoin in terms of market cap.

The token was launched on Ethereum in 2023 and grew to become one of the largest memecoins in record time.

Despite the uselessness, the Pepe increased 8X from $500M in market cap to over $4B in 2024:

As you can see, at the spike in May, it peaked at $7B, which is a 14X from February valuations. 

With a market cap of $4 billion, Pepe is the third largest memecoin only beaten by Dogecoin and Shiba Inu.

Here you can see how Pepe compares to the largest memecoins in terms of market cap:

If you take into account that Dogecoin was created in 2013 and that Shiba Inu was created in 2020, Pepe which was launched in 2023, has seen remarkable growth.

The Pepe roadmap

In 2023, the future of Pepe was described in three stages:

1. Launch and promotion
2. Getting listed on tier 1 exchanges + community partnerships
3. Merchandise and academy

This plan was later changed and the official Pepe website now sums up the three stages, vaguely, like this:

Whatever this means, it can be safe to assume that the team behind Pepe is doing whatever they can to make it the largest memecoin.

The question of course is whether they will succeed.

When it comes to memecoins, the strength of the community is by far the most important factor.

So, if they are to succeed, they need a strong community. 

Tokenomics, another factor that might help boost a meme project, is also worth a quick look. 

I will first look at the tokenomics to tell if there are features of Pepe that make it special and more interesting to buy, and then I’ll discuss the potential of the community.

Tokenomics: Is Pepe special?

Though memecoins have no user-case, many claim to have unique features that make them stand out

There is always various truth to such claims so let's have a look at a couple of the features that might be said to make Pepe unique:

• Burning
• Redistribution
• No-tax policy

Burning

To understand what “burning” is, we should take a step back.

Many crypto tokens have a system that creates some degree of new supply.

For Bitcoin, each time a new block is validated, the validator gets a reward in terms of new Bitcoin.

The process is called “mining”.

Now, for some memecoins, like Dogecoin, the case is the same: new tokens are created through a process built into the project.

That is not the case with Pepe.

Actually, the opposite is the case.

Instead of new tokens being created, causing inflation, they are removed from the existing supply, causing deflation.

Each time a transaction is made, a small percentage of tokens are removed from circulation, they are “burned”.

This means that the total number of Pepe tokens is decreasing, potentially causing the price to go up due to scarcity.

It should also be mentioned that the team behind Pepe did a single burn of 6,9 trillion tokens in 2023.

6,9 trillions sound like much, but compared to the total number of tokens it is not very impressive:

 

This was a response to a drop in price, and a move to reassure investors that the project was still developing and had a future.

The burning turned out to have a positive impact on the price.

Redistribution

In addition to the process of burning, Pepe har built into it a redistribution system.

The system is made to incentivize investors to hold their tokens for a long time.

It allocates a small percentage of every transaction to a pool distributed among all token holders.

In other words, if you have Pepe, each time there is a new transaction, you get a fraction of a small percentage of it.

Thought the amount is small, it becomes significant over time

In other words: the redistribution system works as an incentive for investors to stay with Pepe in the long run.

No-tax policy

Another feature that makes Pepe especially likable amongst investors, is the no-tax policy.

When buying some coins, like MAGA, the transaction incurs additional taxes.

This is not the case with Pepe meaning that people can trade and transact without any additional cost.

The no-tax policy makes Pepe favorable and accessible to new users.

The three features, burning, redistribution, and no-tax policy make Pepe stand out a bit, but the project is by no means reinventing the wheel. 

The Future of Pepe

A memecoin can have all the cool features in the world and still fail.

In the end, what matters the most is the community behind it.

This is what made Pepe do in three weeks what Dogecoin needed four years to do: reach a $1 billion market cap.

Now the question is, how is Pepe doing now?

Let’s start by looking at how many people are holding Pepe compared to the rest of the top memecoins: 

Here, Pepe is quite low compared to the competitors.

A consequence of the few holders and the market cap of Pepe is that it might be overpriced:

Of the top five memecoins, Pepe is the highest priced in terms of MC / holders. 

This might be a problem, as higher MC per holder can indicate a smaller community "per $ of market cap". But with PEPE, it doesn't seem to affect it too much. In fact, the MC / Holders fair much better than for example Dogecoin:

Here we see that Pepe is actually doing slightly better.

Dogecoin is trending slightly downwards, but Pepe is going sideways. 

This indicates that the ratio, though it is high, is sustainable. 

Let's make some assumptions to say something about the future of Pepe:

First, we assume that the mc/holder ratio is sustained through the next bull market.

Second, we assume that the next bull run will happen in Q3 + Q4 of 2025. 

Third, we assume that BTC reaches a price of $180,000: 

A BTC price of $180K equals a BTC market cap of $3.6T. 

If we also assume that the Bitcoin dominance drops to the 40% range, we get a total crypto market of roughly $9T.

The final assumption is that PEPE reaches a market share of 0.3% of the total crypto market:

IF this materializes, PEPE will reach the following market cap and price:

MC = Total crypto market * PEPE Market share

MC = $3T * 0.003 = $27B

Price = MC / Supply

Price = $27B / 420.69T = $0.00006422

At the time of writing, that's a 6.12X from current prices.