“Bad actors”: PepeCoin’s recent founder claims PEPE can still thrive

The largest bear market crypto memecoin of 2023 is officially going strong.

Twitter investigators found 16 trillion PEPE tokens (worth about $16 million) sold on various centralized exchanges such as Binance, Bybit, KuCoin and OKX on Thursday.

PepeCoin Market Cap decreased by 26% to a low of $315.72 million before recovering 7.7% to $342 million at the time of writing.

After two days of silence, someone claiming to be the project’s final founder apologized in a lengthy Twitter post, detailing how unexpected these “three former team members” were. [who] I’m back behind my back.”

After selling 16 trillion PEPE, the anonymous rogue team members” then removed themselves from Multi-Signature in an attempt to exonerate any affiliation with PEPE, and deleted all their social accounts leaving me with nothing but a message saying “Multi-Signature has been updated, you are now under Total control.'”

Multisig wallets, short for multi-signature wallets, are accounts that require a minimum number of separate signatures to perform a transaction.

“the [centralized exchange] “The wallet tokens were never intended to be sold in the marketplace or for the team to benefit from,” the founder wrote. “If I had been responsible all along, I would have made some donations and burned the majority of CEX’s portfolio long ago.”

Approximately 60% of all PEPE tokens were dumped by rogue team members. The sole remaining founder claims that the remaining 10 trillion PEPE tokens – worth around $8.76 million – are “in safe hands”.

Despite the setback, the anonymous member promises to continue moving the project forward, starting with the full decentralization of the project by burning all remaining tokens under the project’s control.

“Since its inception, $PEPE has unfortunately suffered from internal strife as part of the team were bad actors driven by overweening egos and greed.” @pepecoineth The account holder tweeted. “$PEPE is now completely free of this baggage, with clear roads ahead.”

On Saturday, all the rest of the icons were It has been transferred to the new wallet address.

This is not the first time that cryptocurrency projects have fallen prey to multisig exploits. Last year, the popular Web3 game Axie Infinity saw its own Ronin Network It was minted for $622 million in tokens By the attackers, who similarly used the multisig system to approve transactions.

Although multi-signature wallets provide better security than a private key controlled by a single actor, cases like this prove that there are still countless risks surrounding cryptocurrency projects.

PEPE memecoin first It escalated to the market in the month of May During the market frenzy of memecoin trading, fast Enter the top 100 icons By market capitalization and earnings listing in the stock exchange giants binance And Coinbase – bringing the latter Some controversy.