Insiders allegedly stole $15 million from Pepecoin, leading to internal strife and a 20% drop in the coin’s value.
Last week, the infamous meme-based crypto Pepecoin took a severe hit. Some insiders of the project reportedly snuck away with $15 million worth of Pepecoin. This major breach shook the crypto community and led to a sharp 20% dip in the coin’s value. If you’ve ever wondered about the safety of investing in meme coins, this episode serves as a big, red warning sign.
A Shaky Start for Pepecoin
Right from the start, Pepecoin wasn’t a bed of roses. Despite soaring to a jaw-dropping $1.8 billion market value earlier this year, the team behind the project wasn’t getting along well. Things turned sour when a massive amount of Pepecoin—16 trillion tokens, to be exact—suddenly moved without proper approval. These tokens found their way to four big crypto trading platforms: OKX, Binance, Kucoin, and Bybit. After that, the team members behind this fishy move sold the tokens, pushing the coin’s value even lower.
How could this happen? Well, think of the multisig wallet as a high-security vault that needs multiple keys to open. Originally, you’d need five out of eight people to agree before making a transaction. But recently, this changed to just needing two people to say “yes.” This change made it way easier for the dodgy transaction to go through. For the first time, the vault, holding 26 trillion tokens of Pepecoin’s total 420 trillion, swung wide open and let out a significant chunk of its stash.
Rebuilding Trust and Looking Forward
After the money vanished, the person now leading Pepecoin stepped up to apologize and make things right. They have some big plans for Pepecoin’s future, including making the coin more secure and decentralized. They’re also in talks to buy some Pepecoin-related website names. And for the tokens that are still left in that high-security vault? The leader plans to remove them permanently from the market, a process known as “burning.”
This whole mess also shines a spotlight on another big issue—too much control in too few hands. Before all this, experts were already warning that Pepecoin was a risky bet. Why? Because a small group of big investors, known as “whales,” held a lot of the coin’s total value. According to a study by SingularityDAO in June, these whales had about 25% of Pepecoin. And that’s not all; other big investors held another 46%. That’s a lot of power for just a few people, making the price of Pepecoin highly unstable.