In an announcement to the PEPE community, it was claimed that three former members stole funds from the project and then handed over full control to the sole remaining member.
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The circumstances behind the mysterious $16 million withdrawal from the Pepecoin (PEPE) project’s multisig wallet have seemingly been revealed, with the finger pointed at three rogue ex-team members.
On Aug. 24, the price of PEPE plunged by roughly 15% amid fears of a potential rug pull after the community spotted that $16 million worth of PEPE was withdrawn from the Pepe multisig wallet and sent to several exchanges.
Clearing up the matter in an Aug. 25 post on X (formerly Twitter), one of the anonymous founding members behind the project provided a community announcement from the official Pepecoin account, detailing what they claim had happened.
According to the statement, three team members abruptly stole the funds from the multisig and then abandoned the project, leaving it in complete control of the remaining member.
“They then removed themselves from the multisig in an attempt to absolve any association to $PEPE, deleting all of their social accounts and leaving me behind nothing but a message stating ‘the multisig has been updated, you are now in full control,’” they added.
The founding member claimed that the X account and the remaining 10 trillion PEPE in the multsig are now in safe hands, with the funds set to be transferred to a new wallet where “they will safely rest until a use or burn arises.”
It was also asserted that these former members were difficult to work with since Pepecoin launched in April and had held the project back from progress toward its various targets.
Moving forward, the remaining member claimed they will do what’s right for the PEPE community now that the bad actors have gone.
“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,” they said, adding that:
The reaction was mixed in the comments, with some in support or bullish on the announcement, while others were questioning the truth of these claims.
At the time of writing, the price of PEPE has increased by 5.7% over the past 24 hours to sit at $0.000000895278, with a current market cap of $382.7 million, according to data from CoinGecko.
