Hassan Maishera
TL;DR
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Some rogue developers on the Pepecoin team stole $15 million worth of tokens from the project.
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The developers were behind last week’s unprecedented transfers out of the token’s multisig wallet.
Rogue Pepecoin Developers Stole $15M
The Pepecoin team revealed over the weekend that some rogue developers of the project were behind last week’s unprecedented transfers out of the token’s multisig wallet.
an announcement to the $PEPE community:
— Pepe (@pepecoineth) August 26, 2023
Yesterday on August 24th, 2023, a series of unexpected transactions took place from the $PEPE multisig CEX
Wallet in which ~16 Trillion $PEPE tokens (worth roughly $15m USD) were transferred to various crypto exchanges (OKX, Binance,… pic.twitter.com/iZmXV1TAvw
The team pointed out that the developers stole $15 million worth of PEPE from the project. The team wrote on X (formerly Twitter) that;
“Since its inception, $PEPE has unfortunately been plagued by inner strife, with a portion of the team being bad actors led by big egos and greed. There has often been conflict, and the majority of the team involved in $PEPE creation started to distance themselves after the first week of project inception.”
This latest development comes a week after 16 trillion Pepe tokens ($15 million) were illicitly transferred to crypto exchanges OKX, Binance, Kucoin and Bybit before being sold. The weird transactions saw PEPE lose more than 20% of its value within a few hours.
At the time, the analysis showed that the project developers made weird changes to the team’s multisig wallet. In the past, five out of eight signatures were needed before the wallet could make transfers. However, this has been changed to just two signatures.
The transactions were also the first time funds were moved from the project's multisig wallet, which held 26 trillion tokens out of a 420 trillion total supply.
However, the Pepecoin team said they intend to grow and become a fully decentralized project over the next few months. The team lead stated that;
“I have been in negotiation with the owners of some web domains and usernames that I am looking into acquiring for PEPE, and when I am complete with any of these prospective purchases or donations of PEPE from the multi-sig, I will burn the remainder of these multi-sig tokens.”
PEPE has lost more than 2% of its value in the last 24 hours and is currently trading at $0.0000008522 per coin. Since the start of the month, PEPE has lost more than 35% of its value, making it one of the worst performers amongst the top 100 cryptocurrencies by market cap.
