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Author | Qin Xiaofeng

In the past two days, the Meme project PEPE has staged a confusing drama.

In the early morning of August 25th, Beijing time, the PEPE team’s multi-signature address transferred more than 16 trillion PEPE (approximately $16 million) to 4 centralized platforms (OKX, Binance, KuCoin and Bybit exchange) for selling, resulting in The price of PEPE plummeted by more than 25% that day and currently remains 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, it caused an uproar in the community. But it was not until the incident fermented for a whole day (August 26) that the PEPE team came forward to respond. Odaily summed it upAnnouncement highlights: 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.

Ex-team members doing evil things?

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 teams 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 prospects are bright after eliminating internal conflicts. It 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 that seemed to increase transparency caused further doubts in the community.

MCVERSE FounderMcOneThe survey found that the number of addresses approved for multi-signature reached 5. There must be more than 3 people involved. Looks like there are 5 signers. as follows:

CryptoNoddyHe also confirmed the finding and gave his own guess: Unless each person controls two addresses. But it should be disclosed because these signers are essentially the same. And, he also found that the PEPE team after the announcement , the multi-signature address still retains the attackers 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 their distrust of the PEPE announcement:

• Just a crudely fabricated story.

• How do we know you didnt plan this from the beginning so that they could dump some PEPE and pocket the proceeds? The whole thing is fishy, ​​like a pre-set drama.

• This is 100% nonsense. It took you so long to release this thing?

• Destroy the remaining tokens and lets see if what you said is true.

• ……

Finally, amidst doubts from the community, the PEPE team transferred the remaining tokens to a new address: 0x9f5E46E4990dee30665b2e803BA134564D1e087F. At the same time, the PEPE team stated that the Telegram group has been deactivated, the old Telegram account of the group owner 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 concern to the community. One is about whether and how to recover the tokens sold by former members. Who should pay for the losses of the PEPE community? The second is who controls the new address where the remaining assets are located, and is the remaining multi-signature address controlled by one person or a few? The third is the future planning situation, when to destroy the remaining tokens and the transparency of token use.

Founders identity exposed, suspected of insider trading

Given that PEPE is a project created by an anonymous team, the personal information of the three involved members was not included in the recent announcement. However, this smashing still angered the community, and some insiders took the initiative to reveal more information.

KOL PAULY, who has more than 150,000 followers, 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 true identity of the founder of PEPE is Zachary Testa who currently lives in Arizona. Zachary commonly uses the two accounts z (@degenharambe) and Lord Kek (@LordKekLol) for social media activities. 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 through 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 has a record of violations in real life photography - repeated violations of the law in areas where drones are prohibited, multiple fines by the National Park Service, and Entered the blacklist of the public organization publiclandshateyou.

In addition, PAULY also condemned 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 (USD 36.73) to buy 1.69 trillion PEPE after the creation of PEPE, and then sold it for 1001 ETH (USD 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 cleared the PEPE tokens in its hands. According to on-chain analystsemberMonitoring, the address spent 0.03 ETH (about 60 US dollars) to buy 2.43 trillion PEPE on April 15, and sold 554.7 billion PEPE (about 670,000 US dollars) in batches from May to July;8 When PEPE crashed on March 25, the address sold the remaining 1.88 trillion PEPE (approximately US$1.67 million), earning a total profit of more than 30,000 times.

PAULY also broke the news that the official PEPE team holds between 16 and 17 million (USD) worth of PEPE in at least 9 internal wallets — not limited to the currently announced remaining 10 trillion PEPE. 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 urged everyone to report to the SEC: When the sanction exceeds $1 million, the whistleblower reward can range from 10% to 30% of the funds collected.

In the face of this catastrophe, the next most important thing for PEPE is to rebuild user confidence, and it is crucial to disclose more information in a timely manner to increase transparency.

“To be clear, what happens with PEPE is extremely optimistic in the long term. It’s better to get rid of bad actors that make up a large percentage of the supply now than wait for it to happen later.” On-chain analystYazanHe is still optimistic about the future development of PEPE, but he also calls on the PEPE team to take on the responsibility and guide the project to develop better. We just want to see people take responsibility.