Original author: Qin Xiaofeng
Original source: Odaily Planet Daily
In the past two days, the Meme project PEPE has staged a "confusing" drama.
In the early morning of August 25, the PEPE team’s multi-signature address transferred more than 16 trillion PEPE (approximately 16 million US dollars) to 4 centralized platforms (OKX, Binance, KuCoin and Bybit exchange) for selling, causing the PEPE price to drop once that day. It plummeted by more than 25% and currently stands at 0.00000087 USDT.
According to CryptoNoddy monitoring, the reason for the huge sell-off is that the PEPE multi-signature wallet changed the threshold from 5/8 to 2/8, which means that only 2 private key holders need to sign the transaction to transfer team assets.
As soon as the news came out, the community was in an uproar. But it was not until the incident fermented for a whole day (August 26) that the PEPE team came forward to respond. Odaily summarized the key points of the announcement: 3 former members privately deleted their multi-signature permissions and sold their tokens. The remaining tokens are currently safe and will be destroyed in the future.
A former team member committed evil deeds and smashed the market?
The announcement stated that since its inception, PEPE has been plagued by internal strife, with some on the team becoming bad actors due to ego and greed. Previously, these individuals had hindered the team's progress in donating or purchasing tokens using a multi-signature wallet - which was set up to require the presence of 3/4 of the signers to obtain - due to inability to sign transactions, disagreements and being unable to be contacted for weeks. approve. Three former team members secretly returned on August 25, modified the multi-signature threshold, stole 60% of the tokens in the multi-signature wallet, that is, the 16 trillion PEPE, and sent them to the trading platform for sale.
The announcement stated that the remaining 10 trillion tokens in the multi-signature wallet are safe and are no longer accessible to former team members. The PEPE team stated that the future is bright after eliminating internal conflicts, and is currently planning to use the remaining tokens to purchase PEPE domain names, and the remaining tokens will be destroyed in the future.
(PEPE Announcement)
However, this announcement, which seemed to increase transparency, triggered further doubts from the community.
MCVERSE founder McOne found that the number of addresses approved for multi-signature reached 5. "There must have been more than 3 people involved. It looks like there were 5 signatories." Here's what it looks like:
CryptoNoddy also confirmed the discovery and gave his own guess: "Unless each person controls two addresses. But it should be disclosed because these signers are essentially the same." Moreover, he also found that the PEPE team released the announcement Afterwards, the multi-signature address still retains the attacker's signature authority - in other words, the attacker can still continue to withdraw coins, and the remaining 10 trillion tokens are not safe at all.
Many community users also expressed distrust of the PEPE announcement:
"Just a crudely made up story."
"How do we know you didn't plan this from the beginning so they could dump some PEPE and pocket the proceeds? The whole thing is fishy, like a staged drama."
"This is 100% nonsense. It took you so long to release this thing?"
"Destroy the remaining tokens and let us see if what you said is true."
Finally, amid the community’s skepticism, the PEPE team transferred the remaining tokens to a new address: 0x9f5E46E4990dee30665b2e803BA134564D1e087F. At the same time, the PEPE team said that the Telegram group has been deactivated, the group owner’s old Telegram account was hacked, and the group has been taken over by hackers. PEPE is currently restoring access rights or creating new accounts; during this period, all official PEPE notifications will be released through the X platform account, and new Telegram group links will also be shared through the X platform (Twitter) account.
The PEPE team did not respond to other core issues of community concern. First, regarding the tokens sold by former members, whether and how to recover them, and who should pay for the losses of the PEPE community? Second, who controls the new address where the remaining assets are located? Is the remaining multi-signature address controlled by one person or a few people? The third is the future planning situation, when to destroy the remaining tokens and the transparency of token use.
Founder's identity exposed, suspected of insider trading
Given that PEPE is a project created by an anonymous team, there is no personal information about the three involved members in the recent announcement. However, the market crash still angered the community, and some "insiders" took the initiative to reveal more news.
KOL PAULY, who has more than 150,000 fans, posted that the "truth about multi-signature currency selling" officially announced by PEPE is a complete lie, and said that he, Matt Furie and the entire community have been deceived by the PEPE team.
He said that the real identity of the founder of PEPE is Zachary Testa who now lives in Arizona. Zachary is active on social media under the handles z (@degenharambe) and Lord Kek (@LordKekLol). Zachary Testa was born in 1997, graduated from Arizona State University in 2018, and is now a professional photographer.
PAULY accused Zachary Testa and his team of making huge profits from PEPE (even buying a Lamborghini), but did not give any feedback to Matt Furie, the creator of the original image of "Pepe the Frog". In addition, PAULY said that he helped the PEPE team contact the Binance currency listing team and the SushiSwap team, which enabled PEPE to be listed on Binance. PAULY also mentioned that Zachary Testa also had many violations when taking photos in real life - he had repeatedly violated the law in areas where drones are prohibited, and was fined by the National Park Service many times. Entered the blacklist of the public organization publiclandshateyou.
Additionally, PAULY denounced the project for insider trading and disclosed the address of a former PEPE member (0x22f6215b40434d9135b06f1c676fd9291936aac3). It is understood that this address spent 0.0183 ETH ($36.73) to buy 1.69 trillion PEPE after the creation of PEPE, and then sold it for 1,001 ETH ($1.73 million), achieving a 54,725 times profit.
In fact, it has long been an open secret that PEPE team member Mouse Cang. Just in the past few days, another address suspected of being a team member also liquidated its PEPE tokens. According to on-chain analyst Ember monitoring, this address spent 0.03 ETH (about 60 US dollars) to buy 2.43 trillion PEPEs on April 15, and sold 554.7 billion PEPEs (about 67 billion US dollars) in batches from May to July. million US dollars); when PEPE crashed on August 25, this address sold the remaining 1.88 trillion PEPE (approximately US$1.67 million), with a total profit of more than 30,000 times.
PAULY also broke the news that the PEPE official team holds PEPE worth 16 million to 17 million (USD) in at least 9 internal wallets – not just the remaining 10 trillion PEPE currently announced. The reason why there has been no sell-off so far is that we want to gain greater profits by creating short positions on centralized exchanges. Finally, Pauly called on everyone to report to the SEC: "When sanctions exceed $1 million, whistleblower rewards can range from 10% to 30% of the funds collected."
After encountering this disaster, the most important thing for PEPE is to rebuild user confidence. It is crucial to disclose more information in a timely manner and increase transparency.
"To be clear, what happens to PEPE is extremely optimistic in the long term. It is better to get rid of bad actors who account for a large proportion of the supply now than to wait for it to happen later." On-chain analyst Yazan is still optimistic about the future development of PEPE , but he also called on the PEPE team to take on the responsibility and guide the project to develop better. "We just want to see people take responsibility."
(The above content is excerpted and reprinted with the authorization of partner MarsBit, original text link | Source: Odaily Planet Daily)
Statement: The article only represents the author's personal views and opinions, and does not represent the objective views and positions of the blockchain. All contents and opinions are for reference only and do not constitute investment advice. Investors should make their own decisions and transactions, and the author and Blockchain Client will not be held responsible for any direct or indirect losses caused by investors' transactions.
This article tells the story of PEPE’s market crash: “Uneven distribution of spoils” or “planned escape”? First appeared in Block Guest.