As Bitcoin went mainstream in 2017, the memes got weirder. Crypto Twitter adopted Pepe the Frog — the sad cartoon amphibian from Matt Furie’s comics — as its unofficial mascot. Pepe had already been memed into infinity on 4chan, and “Rare Pepes” were being traded as digital collectibles on the Bitcoin Counterparty protocol as early as 2016. They were arguably the first NFTs, predating Ethereum’s ERC-721 standard.
Alongside Pepe came Wojak — the bald, melancholic “Feels Guy” — and his many variants: Doomer, Bloomer, NPC Wojak, and the ubiquitous “two-sided Wojak” showing a smug bull on one side and a crying bear on the other. These became the visual grammar of crypto Twitter, used to express every market emotion from euphoria to despair in a single image.
Crypto Twitter became the town square where these memes lived. Accounts with anime profile pictures analyzed charts. Pseudonymous traders became celebrities. The line between satire and sincerity disappeared. In crypto, a meme could move markets faster than any analyst report.
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