Speculations about Coinbase listing PEPE are rife in the air. Although the exchange has made no comment about a potential listing, Coinbase’s chief legal officer Paul Grewal issued a public apology on Thursday regarding an incident involving the trending memecoin.
We screwed up and we are sorry.
Yesterday we shared an overview of the $pepe meme coin to provide a fact-based picture of a trending topic. This did not provide the whole picture of the history of the meme and we apologize to the community.
— paulgrewal.eth (@iampaulgrewal) May 11, 2023
What Happened with Coinbase and PEPE?
In a newsletter earlier this week, Coinbase had labeled the “Pepe the Frog” meme on which the PEPE memecoin is based as a hate symbol.” The newsletter, however, did not go down with the memecoin community.
Enthusiasts resorted to a Twitter campaign that saw the #DeleteCoinbase hashtag trend on the social media platform. A majority of posts came from Coinbase users who threatened to close their accounts and delete the app if the exchange did not retract its comments on PEPE.
Coinbase has now responded to the public ire, with CLO Paul Grewal noting that their communications “did not provide the whole picture of the history of the meme.”
Although a number of Twitter users acknowledged the apology, some are clamoring for Coinbase to follow up with a listing of the memecoin. Twitter user JpegKillah responded, “Thanks, now list $pepe to make things right.”
Despite launching roughly a month ago, PEPE is already listed on popular exchanges such as Binance, KuCoin, Gemini, and Crypto.com. Yet, a listing on the largest trading platform for U.S. investors would arguably cement its position in the memecoin universe.
At the time of writing, PEPE had a market capitalization of over $500 million, down from $1.54 billion at its market peak last week. Additionally, the token is now almost 70% off its all-time high of $0.000004354.
