Pepe Leads The Charge In Our Wild West
Seemingly out of the dankest pond in crypto land Pepe the Frog has once again appeared like a mischievous trickster out of a fairytale in order to shake the crypto space up with more excitement than I’ve seen in a long while, minting millionaires in days with a chump change investment and bringing people together from all over the world with his charm, as well as sparking a meme coin renaissance.
Part of why I love the crypto space so much is because no matter how many Gary Gensler’s or Elizabeth Warrens in John Wayne cowboy hats try to come in and tame our Wild West our community always comes around and drives them out of Dodge with all the mayhem and antics of frontier town saloon on payday.
As I explored previously, Pepe has a rich and storied history, both as part of our 21st memetic culture, and within crypto, and now he is making history once again, this time on the grassroots level with $PEPE and all the other meme tokens he has inspired in late spring, 2023. Truly we are in the Roaring Twenties all over again, only in the digital arena.
What I love most is how a spontaneous movement like $PEPE sprang up out of nowhere and spread like wildfire. There was no VC backing of this coin or any push to promote it outside the community itself, and it has turned into a raging inferno of FOMO and excitement the likes of which have not been seen for as long as I can remember. I don’t even think the SHIB phenomenon was as wild as this.
I am not going to lie — there was a time after the LUNA and FTX collapse when a part of me thought that all the fun and games of our space were over and that regulators and governments were going to take all the excitement out of crypto, like a cowboy taming a wild horse, but this year's meme coin frenzy has restored my faith in the power that meme culture, crypto culture, and spontaneous, grassroots community building can have in keeping things fresh, exciting, weird and undomesticated.
That fringe weirdness, wildness, and edge-of-your-seat excitement of crypto is part of what keeps me coming back for more after all these years. I have never lost my excitement about the space. I am old school and a bit fringe myself, so there is nothing exciting to me about “real world utility” in NFTs, government regulation, or some big corporate entity finding some boring niche use case for crypto. I got into crypto to be part of a counterculture, not to help make Web 3 embrace the same paymasters and slave drivers that already run Web 2.0 and our current world.
I am not a voting man, and I am not into politics, but if Pepe the Frog ran on a ticket for 2024 I’d be the first guy at the polls next year. Keep our Wild West frontier a safe haven for the free, the weird, and the unexpected.
All I can say about this latest craze in crypto is the eternal “It Feels Good Man.”
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