Buy Pepe

PEPE is a memecoin built around Pepe the Frog, the cartoon character that has circulated online for almost two decades. It is not a coin with its own blockchain. PEPE is an ERC-20 token that lives on Ethereum, the same way QNT and most other tokens do.

The token launched in April 2023, with no presale, no team allocation and no advance announcement. The people behind it have never identified themselves, and there is no company, foundation or formal team to point to. Pepe the Frog was drawn by the artist Matt Furie for his comic Boy's Club in 2005. Furie has no connection to the token, and the project itself says there is no relationship.

PEPE is deliberately useless, and it says so on its own website. The official line on its own website is that PEPE is a meme coin with no intrinsic value or expectation of financial return, intended for entertainment only. There is no staking, no governance, no treasury and no roadmap in any meaningful sense. That is not a criticism we are adding. It is the product.

Why does PEPE have value at all?

Nothing about the token generates revenue, pays interest or gives holders a claim on anything. Its price is set entirely by what buyers will pay at any given moment, which means it moves with meme cycles, social media attention and the mood of the wider crypto market rather than with any fundamental.

A few design choices still matter to buyers, because they affect what can and cannot happen to the token:

• No presale and no team allocation. The entire supply went into circulation at launch, so there is no locked tranche waiting to hit the market in the way there is with many tokens.
• The contract was renounced. The deployer gave up administrative control, so the contract cannot be changed to add a fee, freeze wallets or mint new tokens.
• The liquidity was burned. The tokens representing the original trading pool on Uniswap were sent to a burn address, so the deployer cannot withdraw that pool.

None of this makes PEPE safe. It makes the contract simple and hard to tamper with, which is a different thing. Our guide to Ethereum explains the network the token actually runs on, and our guide to altcoins covers where memecoins sit in the wider market.

How did PEPE start, and what happened to its treasury?

The launch split was 93.1% of the supply going straight into the Uniswap trading pool, with the remaining 6.9% held in a multisignature wallet, described at the time as a reserve for future exchange listings, bridges and liquidity.

That reserve produced PEPE's most instructive episode. On 24 August 2023, around 16 trillion PEPE, roughly 60% of what sat in that wallet, was moved to exchanges and sold. A remaining signer on the wallet said three former team members had accessed it without authorisation, lowered the signing threshold, taken the tokens, sold them and deleted their social accounts. The price fell sharply in the aftermath.

The episode is worth knowing about before you buy, because it shows where the risk in a memecoin actually sits. The smart contract did not fail. The token's rules did not change. A group of people who had access to a large pile of tokens sold them, and everyone else found out afterwards. Anonymous teams and multisignature reserves are trusted until they are not.

How is PEPE different from Dogecoin?

PEPE is regularly compared with Dogecoin, and the comparison mostly shows how different they are.

	PEPE	Dogecoin
Type	ERC-20 token on Ethereum	Its own proof of work blockchain
Launched	2023	2013
How new coins are created	None, supply fixed at launch	Mined continuously, no supply cap
Supply	420,690,000,000,000 tokens	Uncapped and growing
Stated purpose	Entertainment only, no utility	Started as a joke, now accepted for payments in places
Team	Anonymous, no formal team	Named developers and a foundation
Where the joke came from	Pepe the Frog, 2005	The Doge Shiba Inu meme, 2013

The structural difference that matters most is the supply. Dogecoin prints new coins every minute forever. PEPE's supply was set once and cannot be increased. You can buy Dogecoin on CoinJar too, and its page covers that asset in detail.

How is new PEPE created, and is the supply capped?

PEPE is not mined and cannot be staked, and no new PEPE will ever be created. The entire supply of 420,690,000,000,000 tokens was minted at launch, the contract has no mint function, and control of the contract has been given up, so no one can add to it.

The number itself is a joke: 420 and 69 are long-running internet numbers, and the supply was set so the figure reads 420.69 trillion. Because the supply is that large, each token trades for a tiny fraction of a cent, which trips up new buyers. A low unit price does not mean a coin is cheap in any useful sense, and PEPE could never reach one dollar without exceeding the value of every asset on Earth many times over.

There is also no burn mechanism in the contract, although tokens can be sent to burn addresses voluntarily. Treat any claim about PEPE burns as marketing unless it points to a verifiable transaction.

What should Australian customers consider before buying PEPE?

PEPE is one of the most volatile things we list. It has had very large drawdowns in past market cycles, and you should only put in money you can afford to lose entirely. Consider the following before you buy.

• It is a meme, by its own description. There is no utility, no revenue and no team building anything. If attention moves on, there is nothing underneath to hold the price.
• The team is anonymous. The August 2023 incident showed that access to large holdings by unidentified people is a real risk, not a theoretical one.
• Holdings are concentrated. Most of the supply went into one pool at launch, and large wallets can move the market in either direction without warning.
• The ticker is shared by impostors. Many unrelated tokens use the PEPE name or ticker on other chains. The token on this page is the original Ethereum token, contract address 0x6982508145454ce325ddbe47a25d4ec3d2311933. Anything else is a different asset.
• Unit price is not value. Buying millions of tokens for a small amount feels different from buying a fraction of bitcoin, but the maths is identical.
• Memecoin markets can thin out. Liquidity that exists today is not guaranteed tomorrow, and in fast moves the price you get can be far from the price you saw.
• No government protection. PEPE is not covered by the Australian Government's Financial Claims Scheme, which protects certain bank deposits and insurance policies but does not extend to cryptoassets.

PEPE on CoinJar in Australia

CoinJar has operated since 2013 and lists PEPE against Australian dollars, so you can buy, sell and hold it without converting through another cryptocurrency first. PEPE is also listed against Australian dollars on CoinJar Exchange. Current charges are on our fees page, and live Australian dollar rates are on our cryptocurrency prices page.

PEPE sits alongside the rest of our supported cryptocurrency list, and you can withdraw it to any wallet that supports Ethereum and ERC-20 tokens. Our guide to crypto transfers explains what to check before you send.

PEPE you hold with CoinJar is kept in our custody infrastructure, where private keys are split across offline and hardware protected systems so no single party can move assets on its own. You can read how that works on our security page.

CoinJar is registered with AUSTRAC as a digital currency exchange provider, Registration No. DCE100749118-001. Registration is a legal requirement for exchanges operating in Australia. It is not a government endorsement of CoinJar or of PEPE.

How is PEPE taxed in Australia?

The ATO generally treats PEPE as a capital gains tax asset. A CGT event can occur when you sell it for Australian dollars, exchange it for another cryptoasset, spend it or give it away.

The ATO explains these rules on its official guidance page. Our guide to crypto tax in Australia provides a practical overview. This is general information, not tax advice. Consider speaking to a registered tax agent about your circumstances.