PepeCoin Faces Controversy as Developer Team Accuses Rogue Members
Since last week, the Pepe Coin ecosystem has been rocked by social media allegations that the project is a giant hoax. According to a Pepe developer, three members of the memecoin’s developer team ‘went rogue’ last week and conducted large transfers outside of Pepe’s multi-sig wallet for malevolent purposes. Because the memecoin’s programming team stays secret, no names of relevant parties have been released 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 today explained in a tweet.
More specifically, the developer stated that three now-ex-members of Pepe’s developer team took 16 trillion, or 60% of the 26 trillion tokens, from its multi-sig wallet and wired them to centralized exchanges for sale.
“They then removed themselves from the multi-sig in an attempt to absolve any relationship with $PEPE, erasing all of their social accounts and left me behind nothing but a message declaring “The multi-sig has been updated, you are now in complete control,” the tweet said.
The anonymous developer did state that most or all of the tokens taken from Pepe’s multi-sig wallet were swiftly sold on OKX and Binance, without exposing the magnitude of the losses to the Pepe community or any intentions to compensate victims.
According to the developer, the remaining 10 trillion tokens in the multi-sig wallet are currently under the supervision of a trusted project loyalist.
While some have praised the Pepe team’s honesty in the aftermath of this tweet, others have commented under the article, expressing worries about the project.
Pepe’s value dropped by 15% last week and is now worth $0.0000008727 (approximately Rs. 0.000072). Not only were Pepe’s multi-sig wallet settings modified, but 16 trillion Pepe tokens worth $15 million (about Rs. 123 crore) were transferred from Pepe’s multi-sig wallet to four centralized exchanges.
These reasons created an atmosphere of FUD — fear, uncertainty, and doubt — among members of the Pepe community, many of whom felt that the entire Pepe project was fake.
Out of a total quantity of over 420 trillion tokens, over 391 trillion Pepe tokens are now in circulation.
Keywords: pepecoin, pepe frog meme, bitcoin
Image: Twitter/PepeCoinETH