Why is the $PEPE Community Calling For Us To #DeleteCoinbase
What’s got the $PEPE faithful up in arms now? Let’s dive into the nitty-gritty of how Coinbase triggered the wrong community.
Wait, what’s going on?
Head over to Twitter Trends where you’re most likely to find topics centering around the NBA playoffs or highly politically charged topics. If you’re reading this now, you’ll also notice a trending tag in all caps titled ‘#DELETECOINBASE’ with over 50,300 Tweets.
Click on one of them and you’ll find a plethora of memes about PEPE taking the piss on Coinbase and its founder, Brian Armstrong. Images like this.
Scroll a little bit through ‘#DeleteCoinbase’ and you’ll fondly recall that old saying “The internet is undefeated.” It surely is undefeated cause the $PEPE faithful are throwing some major haymakers at Armstrong & company.
So why are they angry?
Well, Coinbase sent a newsletter out to describe $PEPE to their email subscribers. Here’s a post by borovik.eth with a screencapture of the newsletter and the comment that sparked this whole controversy.
borovik.eth and other $PEPE holders had a problem with Coinbase associating $PEPE with a hate symbol connected with the alt-right. Specifically, they had an issue with this sentence: “Over time it has been co-opted as a hate symbol by alt-right groups, according to the Anti-Defamation League.”
What’s wrong with Coinbase’s description?
The small blurb doesn’t tell the whole story. We need to look at where Pepe the Frog started and how the meme (not the coin) got picked up by alt-right groups.
Not to get too in-depth, just look at the following dates and descriptions.
2005 Matt Furie releases Boy’s Club, a comic featuring Pepe the Frog spreading ‘good vibes’
2014 Pepe the Frog (not the coin!) is used as a meme around 4chan groups spreading coded, extremely disturbing anti-semitic vibes
2023 Meme coin $PEPE skyrockets in price with overall good vibes for the crypto community
You see it? There’s a lot of context (and evolution) surrounding Pepe the Frog and $PEPE, but Coinbase decided to give it’s newsletter subscribers a blurb that blurs the association between the meme, the appropriated meme, and the coin. (Small disclaimer: there is a lot more to the evolution of the meme and the emergence of the token. My point above is simply Coinbase just went for a paragraph to describe everything. Probably Chat GPT.)
Anyhow, it was a Piss. Poor. Job.
So the community is angry and backlash is real.
Yes, 🍿 I’m ready. Tell me more!
$PEPE fans and some influencers have been calling for people to switch ship to the Winklevoss twins’ exchange, Gemini.
$PEPE fans are also calling for people to short Coinbase, $COIN.
Markets are closed now but it’ll be interested to see what happens when the NYSE opens tomorrow.
Final Thoughts?
There is a burning question that has been bothering me all day.
Why did Coinbase feel the need to add this association? I think I have guess at what happened.
Basically this:
Legal OR Diversity Officer(whatever it’s called) OR Someone very sensitive: Hey I looked over the newsletter, we need to state that Pepe is a hate symbol.
Marketer: Okay. [Views a couple of BuzzFeed articles from 2014. Asks Chat GPT to “write a paragraph describing how pepe became symbol for alt-right”] Done. Can I send the newsletter now?
Legal OR Diversity Officer(whatever it’s called) OR Someone very sensitive: Yeah, looks good. Thanks, Jim.
I have no evidence (obviously); it’s just a gut feeling. “Hey, we need to be ahead of this and make sure we’re not offending someone.” Then, “Let’s do a quick internet search and just write something that clears us instead of trying to understand the issue.”
Meh, I could be wrong. Regardless, let’s see if they really short $COIN.
