Pepe would be ashamed by PEPE investors

cointelegraph.com:

Death threats, viral rap videos and a stream of frog-themed insults. That’s the state of my social media profiles after hosting a Twitter Space on May 8 about PEPE, the new token based on the “Pepe” meme.

Poignantly hosted during a monumental PEPE price crash, Cointelegraph set out in the May 8 Twitter Space to understand the token. Why had it surged so quickly? What separates PEPE from the thousands of other memecoins and dozens of other PEPE tokens? And what’s the duration of these token projects?

The backlash was "ribbiting."

"It's all goin' to zero" $PEPE ADVICE SOUND UP pic.twitter.com/K8Uw1KvnSs

Though we endeavored to talk about PEPE’s popularity, I ended up enduring rather grim — if predictable — personal outcomes.

I’ve been memed into myriad amphibian images, someone painted a Microsoft Paint Pepe portrait of me, I feature in a rap song, I’ve received over 100 written insults in my Twitter DMs, and I’ve been photoshopped into weird and wonderful frog poses.

On top of that, one of the speakers on the Twitter Space, Irina Heaver — a lawyer based in Dubai — has received personalized death threats. (She’s OK, by the way.)

So, what on earth is going on? How is a token that’s barely one month old generating such high levels of harassment, toxic behavior and diehard commitment?

The PEPE token hopped over a $1 billion market cap this week. The milestone meant that a meme token that is “completely useless” — according to the PEPE website — now exceeds the gross domestic product of some countries.

Kudos to PEPE. It has shown us that even the most unassuming of memes (with a somewhat checkered past) can transform into billion-dollar success stories. It’s an amphibious achievement that has presumably left the somewhat “traditional”