Since its inception, $PEPE has unfortunately been plagued by inner strife, with a portion of the team being bad actors led by big egos and greed, a developer who claimed to now be in control of the project said in a tweet. Last week, over 16 trillion Pepe tokens ($15 million) were illicitly transferred to crypto exchanges OKEx, Binance, KuCoin, and Bybit before being sold, contributing to a nearly 20% slide in the frog-themed tokens.
On-chain sleuths previously noted troubling changes to the oversight of how a developer-related wallet handled transaction approvals. Instead of requiring five of eight wallets to sign off on transactions, it had changed to only two out of eight. The transactions represented the first time the project’s multi-sig wallet—which held 26 trillion tokens out of a 420 trillion total supply—had ever sent out the meme coin.
The developer in control of the project now has apologized on X posts, stating they plan to grow, and eventually fully decentralize, the project in the months ahead. They have also been in negotiation with the owners of some web domains and usernames that they are looking into acquiring for PEPE, and when they are complete with any of these prospective purchases or donations of PEPE from the multi-sig, they will burn the remainder of these multi-sig tokens.
Pepe was one of 2021’s biggest success stories amid a generally bearish market, zooming to a peak market capitalization of $1.8 billion in mid-May, seeing trading volumes surpass those of Dogecoin (DOGE) and Shiba Inu (SHIB)—which are otherwise the biggest meme coins by trading volume. However, analysts have repeatedly warned of the early activity of Pepecoin traders as well as the absence of retail traders.
The limited amount of net liquidity is creating a high-stakes game of musical chairs, shared Rafe Tariq, senior quant at SingularityDAO, in a research note in June. Everyday investors are being lured in with the hopes of big profits, but the reality is that a small percentage of investors will walk away with profit, while everyone else will get burnt. At the time, SingularityDAO also found that a small number of large-scale investors, known as whales, hold up to approximately 25% of PEPE, while other large investors hold up 46% of the currently circulating supply.