The team behind the sensational meme coin Pepe has released a statement on recent large chunks of PEPE transfers to crypto exchanges.
On August 24th, a series of large amounts of PEPE transactions has been recorded, totaling approximately 16 trillion tokens or roughly $15 million. The tokens were sent to leading crypto exchanges including Binance, OKX, Kucoin, and Bybit with the intention to sell in the market.
As per the statement shared by Pepe, these malicious actions are from “bad actors” who were a part of the core team previously.
“The multi-sig was setup to require 3/4 signers present for an approval,” said the official team member in the statement, adding “Yesterday these 3 ex-team members came back behind my back, logged onto the multi-sig, stole 16 Trillion/ 60% of the 26 trillion multi-sig tokens, and sent them to exchanges to sale.”
The wallet, from where funds are stolen, is managed by the team. In the official statement, the man behind the project ensured that all remaining Pepe tokens and Twitter account is in safe hands.
Later on August 26, the team shared that they have transferred the remaining 10.6 trillion PEPE token to a new address.
Amid PEPE memecoin’s abrupt and hefty surge in the cryptocurrency market, the team members were drawn in internal conflicts after the first week of its launch. Some members ‘being bad actors led by big egos and greed’ blocked team operations such as progress on making donations or purchases with multi-sig tokens, emphasized the spokesperson.
The accused team members have deleted all their contacts and social media accounts as well as removed themselves from multi-sig in order to take a complete exit from the Pepe project
Following the news, PEPE took a dump of ~20% on Friday with its market cap falling from $412 million to $318 million within hours.
