Pepe Coin’s Team Reeling Under Internal Conflict, Financial Drama Unfolds

Pepe’s anonymous team has still not disclosed names of the ‘rouge’ developers responsible for last week’s chaos.

Written by Radhika Parashar, Edited by Siddharth Suvarna | Updated: 29 August 2023 07:37 IST

Pepe Coin’s Team Reeling Under Internal Conflict, Financial Drama Unfolds

Photo Credit: Twitter/ @PepeCoinETH

PEPE is inspired by a cartooned frog that often finds its way on popular Internet memes

Highlights

Pepe has not rug-pulled its investors, as of now
Some Pepe developers misused their position to steal tokens from the proj
Intensity of losses not assessed, disclosed by Pepe developers as of now

Pepe Coin ecosystem is undergoing turbulent times since last week as speculations about the project being a big scam heated up on social media. A Pepe developer has claimed that three members of the memecoin's developer team ‘went rogue' last week and made bulky transfers outside of Pepe's multi-sig wallet for their malicious motives. Since the developer team behind the memecoin remains anonymous, no names of responsible parties have been revealed on public domains.

“$PEPE has unfortunately been plagued by inner strife with a portion of the team being 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 tweet.

Disclosing more details, the developer said the three now ex-members of Pepe's developer team stole 16 trillion or 60 percent of the 26 trillion tokens from its multi-sig wallet and wired them for sale to centralised exchanges.

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“They then removed themselves from the multi sig in an attempt to absolve any association to $PEPE, deleting all of their social accounts and leaving me behind nothing but a message stating “the multi-sig has been updated, you are now in full control,” the tweet added.

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

For now, the remaining 10 trillion tokens in the multi-sig wallet are under the oversight of a trusted project loyalist, the developer claimed.

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an announcement to the $PEPE community:

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
— Pepe (@pepecoineth) August 26, 2023

While some have lauded Pepe team's transparency following this tweet, the others commented under the post saying they now have concerns about the project.

Only newbies would believe that story
— Klown :slot_machine: (@klown_777) August 26, 2023

Name and shame, take accountability.
— ROLLABLAZΞR :frog: (@rollablazer) August 26, 2023

Last week, the value of Pepe dived by 15 percent and is currently trading at $0.0000008727 (roughly Rs. 0.000072). Not only were the settings of Pepe's multi-sig wallet changed, but also 16 trillion Pepe tokens amounting to $15 million (roughly Rs. 123 crore) were transferred from Pepe's multi-sig wallet into four centralised exchanges.

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

Currently, over 391 trillion Pepe tokens are in circulation out of its pre-decided total supply of over 420 trillion tokens.

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Further reading: Cryptocurrency, Pepe Coin, Scam

Radhika Parashar

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Radhika Parashar is a senior correspondent for Gadgets 360. She has been reporting on tech and telecom for the last three years now and will be focussing on writing about all things crypto. Besides this, she is a major sitcom nerd and often replies in Chandler Bing and Michael Scott references. For tips or queries you could reach out to her at RadhikaP@ndtv.com. More