The only remaining developer of the Pepe meme token (PEPE) said that three former members of the project team are behind the theft of 16 trillion coins (~$15 million).
On August 25, on-chain researchers noticed that the PEPE multisig wallet reduced the number of required confirmations from 5 to 2 and transferred part of the assets to decentralized exchanges OKX, Binance, KuCoin and Bybit.
“Since its inception, PEPE has unfortunately been plagued by internal strife with part of the team being saboteurs driven by big ego and greed. Conflicts arose frequently, and most of those involved in the creation of the coin began to distance themselves a week after the launch, ”said the developer.
The representative of the project apologized for the situation and noted that now only he controls the smart contracts of the token. According to him, PEPE will be fully decentralized in the coming months.
Stolen coins account for about 4% of the total supply, and about 10 trillion PEPE remained in the multisig wallet. These tokens will be transferred to a new address, where they will be “securely stored until there is a need to use or burn them,” the programmer explained.
The developer also assured that the assets and account of the project in X (formerly Twitter) are safe.
Amid the alleged fraud, the price of PEPE fell by almost 20%. At the time of writing, the coin is still holding at $0.00000087.
Recall that at the end of April, PEPE grew tenfold, turning some of the asset holders into millionaires.
In May, users contributed $46 million to exchanges in a mem-token per day. Then experts warned about the risks of dumping the coin.