The only remaining developer of the meme token Pepe (PEPE) said that three former members of the project team were behind the theft of 16 trillion coins (~$15 million).
On August 25, on-chain researchers noticed that the PEPE multi-signature wallet reduced the number of required confirmations from 5 to 2 and transferred part of the assets to the decentralized exchanges OKX, Binance, KuCoin and Bybit.
“Since its inception, PEPE has unfortunately suffered from internal strife, with some of the team being saboteurs driven by big egos 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,” the developer said.
The project representative apologized for the situation and noted that now only he controls the smart contracts of the token. According to him, PEPE will be completely decentralized in the coming months.
The stolen coins account for about 4% of the total supply, and there are about 10 trillion PEPE left in the multisig wallet. These tokens will be transferred to a new address, where they will be “safely stored until there is a need to use or burn them,” the programmer explained.
The developer also assured that the project's assets and account on 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 hovering at $0.00000087.
