Topline
Coinbase Chief Legal Officer Paul Grewal apologized to investors in the obscure novelty cryptocurrency Pepecoin on Thursday, after the company drew outrage and boycott threats for documenting how the coin’s namesake—the cartoon meme Pepe the Frog—has been used as an alt-right hate symbol.
Coinbase offers more than 250 cryptocurrencies for users to trade. (Photo illustration by Jakub … [+]
Key Facts
On Wednesday, a Coinbase newsletter discussed a recent surge of interest in “memecoins” like Pepecoin, and pointed out that the Pepe meme has been co-opted as a hate symbol by alt-right groups, citing a classification made by the Anti-Defamation League.
Twitter users and Pepecoin investors took to Twitter using the hashtag #deletecoinbase, which is currently trending with more than 180,000 tweets, calling for a boycott of Coinbase and claiming Pepe isn’t exclusively used toward racist ends—despite its frequent appearances in far-right imagery.
One day later, Grewal tweeted that Coinbase did not provide “the whole picture of the history of the meme,” and apologized for the overview of the memecoin—the Coinbase newsletter now includes an editor’s note apologizing.
Pepecoin (PEPE) is not yet able to be traded on Coinbase; however, crypto exchange Gemini listed it for trading after exchanges like Binance also listed the memecoin.
Key Background: Pepe the Frog, the meme Pepecoin is based on, has a long history. The character was created for a 2005 comic strip by cartoonist Matt Furie and eventually became an internet meme used in a variety of contexts. Around the 2016 presidential election, Pepe’s usage increasingly went beyond harmless, funny memes and extended into racist imagery. Although it was not his first time dealing with the appropriation of the character, Furie was aware of what had become of the meme and announced in 2017 that he killed off Pepe. The meme is still very prevalent in internet culture and despite its use as a hate symbol, the majority of its uses “have been, and continue to be, non-bigoted,” according to the Anti-Defamation League.
Important Number: $0.000001385. That’s the price of Pepecoin as of Thursday afternoon, according to CoinMarketCap. Like other memecoins, the price of Pepecoin has been subject to wild price swings — the coin trades for an extremely small fraction of a cent and has fallen more than 25% in the last 24 hours.
Tangent: Pepecoin, created by anonymous founders, was first issued in the middle of April on Ethereum. It reached a market cap high of $1.6 billion in early May but has fallen significantly since then.
Surprising Fact: The Anti-Defamation League teamed up with Furie in 2016 to form a #SavePepe campaign in an attempt to reclaim the character from those who used it as a hate symbol.
Further Reading:
Coinbase calls Pepe a ‘hate symbol,’ prompting calls to boycott the exchange (Cointelegraph)
The Full Tale Of Pepe The Frog’s Journey From Innocent Cartoon To Racist Icon (Forbes)
Pepe Is Everything Wrong With Crypto And We Love It (Forbes)
Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/antoniopequenoiv/2023/05/11/coinbase-apologizes-for-tying-meme-token-pepecoin-to-racist-symbols/