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Before PEPE launched in April 2023, most analysts had declared the memecoin era dead. The 2022 crypto winter had wiped out SafeMoon, Floki, and dozens of other meme tokens. SHIB had crashed 90%. Doge was forgotten. Then PEPE arrived, ran 7,000x in three weeks, and proved that the meme money cycle had simply been hibernating, not extinct.

PEPE’s success unleashed a flood of imitators. New frog coins, dog coins, cat coins, AI memecoins — all launched in PEPE’s wake. The Solana memecoin renaissance that followed in late 2023 (BONK, WIF, BOME, etc.) drew its energy directly from PEPE’s explosion. Without PEPE, there would have been no Solana meme supercycle. The 2023-2024 memecoin era began with a single frog token launched by an anonymous team — proof that culture, not capital, drives crypto.

On April 17, 2023, an anonymous team launched PEPE — a memecoin on Ethereum based on Matt Furie’s frog. The launch had no presale, no team allocation, no roadmap, no whitepaper. The website was a single page with a Pepe image and a contract address. The team described it as “the most memeable memecoin in existence.” Within 24 hours, PEPE had a market cap of $5 million.

It quickly became a phenomenon. Day after day, PEPE doubled. Then doubled again. By May 5, 2023 — just over two weeks after launch — PEPE’s market cap had crossed $1.5 billion. Early buyers became overnight millionaires. The 2022 crypto winter had just ended, and PEPE was the first sign that the meme economy was back. The frog had returned, and this time he was wearing a price chart.

From its launch price to its all-time high in May 2023, PEPE delivered a return of approximately 7,000x. A $100 investment at launch would have been worth $700,000 just three weeks later. The chart was nearly vertical. Crypto Twitter was filled with screenshots of small wallets that had become life-changing fortunes. The PEPE rally was the fastest meaningful gain of any token in the post-2022 era.

Of course, almost no one captured the full rally. Most people heard about PEPE only after it had already gone up 100x, bought too late, and watched it correct. But for the few who caught it early — usually anonymous wallets with tiny initial deposits — PEPE was generational wealth. Stories spread of teenagers turning $50 into $5 million. The PEPE rally became the new template for what a meme coin pump could look like.

Released in 2020, Feels Good Man is a feature-length documentary about Matt Furie’s fight to reclaim Pepe from political extremists. Directed by Arthur Jones, it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and won the Special Jury Prize for Emerging Filmmaker. The film tells the story of how a sweet cartoon frog became a global meme, then a hate symbol, then the subject of a one-man legal and creative campaign to take him back.

The documentary humanized both Pepe and Furie. Audiences who had only known Pepe as a controversial internet symbol learned about the gentle artist behind him. Furie became a sympathetic figure — a man fighting for his creation against forces beyond his control. Feels Good Man remains the definitive document of how Pepe lost and partially regained his innocence, and the most important film ever made about meme culture.

Between 2008 and 2014, Pepe spread organically across the early social web. MySpace users posted the “feels good man” image as a reaction to good news. Tumblr communities adopted Sad Pepe and Smug Pepe as emotional shorthand. But the home that defined Pepe’s identity was 4chan’s /b/ board, where users began drawing custom Pepes — Smug Pepe, Sad Pepe, Angry Pepe, Crying Pepe — and trading them like baseball cards.

By 2014, Pepe had become the most reused image on 4chan. He was the universal mascot of internet culture. Anonymous users built entire visual languages around him. The “rare Pepes” subculture began — the idea that some Pepes were more valuable than others. It was a precursor to NFTs, complete with collectors, traders, and an underground economy. Pepe was no longer Matt Furie’s creation. He belonged to the internet.

In late 2016, a group of Pepe traders moved their hobby onto the blockchain. Using the Counterparty protocol — a layer built on top of Bitcoin that allowed for token issuance — they began minting “Rare Pepe” cards as digital collectibles. Each card was a unique image of Pepe in a specific scene, with a fixed supply, registered permanently on Bitcoin’s blockchain.

The Rare Pepe Wallet launched in 2016 and became the first true marketplace for digital art collectibles. Cards traded for hundreds, then thousands of dollars. A “Homer Pepe” eventually sold for $39,000. This was years before the term “NFT” was popularized, years before CryptoPunks dominated headlines. Rare Pepes were the original blockchain art collectibles. The current multi-billion-dollar NFT industry owes its existence to a community of frog meme traders on Bitcoin.

Around 2015, a small group of online extremists began using Pepe imagery to spread political messages. They drew Pepes wearing Nazi uniforms, MAGA hats, and KKK robes. The mainstream Pepe community was horrified. Most of the millions of people who had loved and shared Pepe had no political agenda — they just liked the frog. But the appropriation accelerated.

By 2016, the situation was bad enough that the Anti-Defamation League formally classified Pepe as a hate symbol. Mainstream news outlets ran stories about how a cartoon frog had become a tool for online hate. Matt Furie was devastated. The character he had created as a gentle stoner frog had been weaponized in ways he never imagined. The damage to Pepe’s public image would take years to undo — and arguably has never been fully reversed.

In May 2017, exhausted by the political hijacking of his creation, Matt Furie published a single-page comic in which Pepe the Frog was depicted lying dead in an open casket, his friends from Boy’s Club mourning him. Furie called it Pepe’s funeral. He hoped killing the character symbolically would distance him from the hate groups that had stolen his image.

It didn’t work. The hate groups kept using Pepe. But the funeral comic launched a new chapter: Furie became a public advocate for reclaiming Pepe. He sued companies for using Pepe in racist contexts, fought to get the ADL classification reconsidered, and worked with documentary filmmakers to tell Pepe’s real story. The 2020 film Feels Good Man documented this fight. Furie’s effort to save his frog became a parable about who owns culture in the meme age.

Dogecoin is the grandparent of every memecoin. Compared to its descendants — SHIB, PEPE, BONK, WIF — it looks slow, conservative, and almost respectable. SHIB has a complex tokenomics and burn mechanism. PEPE is a pure speculation play. BONK is a Solana phenomenon. Doge, by contrast, is just a coin you can send to people. No farms, no staking, no NFTs.

And yet Doge endures. Through every crypto cycle since 2013, it has remained in the top 20 by market cap. The newer memecoins burn brighter and crash harder. Doge keeps moving. Its resilience comes from its simplicity: there’s nothing complicated to break, no protocol to fail, no team to abandon ship. It’s a meme, and the meme is the product. That’s why it has outlasted every crypto cycle.

Within the Dogecoin community, there’s a long-running argument: should Dogecoin try to add real utility, or should it stay pure meme? The pro-utility camp argues that adoption requires use cases — payments, smart contracts, integration with services. The pro-meme camp argues that what makes Doge special is its lack of pretense; the moment it tries to be “serious,” it becomes just another failed altcoin.

So far, the meme camp has mostly won. Dogecoin has seen incremental improvements but no dramatic pivot to becoming a smart-contract platform or DeFi hub. Critics call this lack of evolution Dogecoin’s greatest weakness. Defenders call it the secret of its longevity. The debate will continue as long as the coin exists. Is Dogecoin a joke that became money, or money that started as a joke? The answer probably depends on the day.