PEPE’s Impact on the 2023 Memecoin Renaissance

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.