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Pepe founder blames ‘nefarious ex-team members’ for unexpected $16M withdrawal

Press Releases Crypto News CryptoSlate Pepe founder blames ‘nefarious ex-team members’ for unexpected $16M withdrawal

On Aug. 24, 16 trillion Pepe tokens (PEPE), worth around $15.7 million at the time, were unexpectedly withdrawn from the project’s multi-signature centralized exchange wallet. An anonymous founder of the meme coin pointed the finger at three former team members as the culprits behind the transfers in a post on Aug. 25.

The transfer, in which around 60% of the PEPE tokens in the multi-sig wallet were moved, sparked speculations of a rug pull. The stolen Pepe tokens were quickly transferred to and sold on exchanges including Binance, OKX, KuCoin, and Bybit. The price of PEPE fell about 15% on the transfer day as investors started panicking.

Digital asset research firm ASXN also reported that the number of signatures required to operate the multi-sign wallet was changed from 5/8 to 2/8.

Pepe founder’s explanation of the incident

According to the founder, who posted his extensive statement on X, formerly Twitter,

“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.”

The founder added that while the project is now “entirely free of this baggage,” the founding team often faced conflict since its early days. The “majority” of the token’s founding team started distancing themselves after the first week of project inception, the founder noted.

The founder complained that these team members “blocked” progress on making donations or purchases with multi-sig tokens. The alleged team members withheld signatures either because of disagreements, inability to provide signatures, or being unreachable for “weeks at a time,” the founder wrote, adding:

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Author: Monika Ghosh

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