Pepe Coin’s team falters and financial drama ensues

The Pepe Coin ecosystem has been in turbulent times since last week as speculation of a major scam on the project surfaced on social media. A Pepe developer has claimed that three members of the memecoin development team made malicious large-scale transfers outside of Pepe’s multi-sig wallet last week. Since the development team behind the memecoin remains anonymous, no names of those responsible have been disclosed on public domains.

“$PEPE has unfortunately been plagued by civil unrest as part of the team consists of bad actors led by big egos and greed,” the unnamed developer, who claims to be in control of the project, now published in an explanatory statement tweet.

The developer provided more details, saying the three former members of Pepe’s development team stole 16 trillion, or 60 percent of the 26 trillion tokens, from its multi-sig wallet and transferred them to centralized exchanges for sale.

“They then removed themselves from multi-signature to sever any connection with $PEPE, deleted all their social accounts and left me nothing but a message stating: ‘multi-signature has been updated, you are now in full control.’ ‘ the tweet added.

Without revealing the extent of the losses to the Pepe community and any plans to compensate victims, the anonymous developer said most or all of the tokens stolen from Pepe’s multi-sig wallet were quickly sold on OKX and Binance.

The developer claimed that the remaining 10 trillion tokens in the multi-sig wallet are under the supervision of a trusted project trustee for now.

While some praised the Pepe team’s transparency following this tweet, others commented below the post that they now have concerns about the project.

Last week Pepe is down 15 percent and is currently trading at $0.0000008727 (approximately Rs.0.000072). Not only were the settings of Pepe’s multi-sig wallet changed, but 16 trillion Pepe tokens worth $15 million (approximately 123 crore) were transferred from Pepe’s multi-sig wallet to four central exchanges.

These factors created a climate of FUD – fear, uncertainty and doubt – among members of the Pepe community, many of whom suspected the entire Pepe project was a sham.

There are currently over 391 trillion Pepe tokens in circulation out of the pre-determined total supply of over 420 trillion tokens.