Investors of the popular meme coin, $PEPE, were (understandably) alarmed on Thursday after millions of dollars worth of $PEPE suddenly flooded crypto exchanges, including Binance, OKX, and Bybit.
Memecoins like Pepe Coin, Dogecoin, and Shiba Inu, are digital currencies created and promoted around a popular internet meme or cultural trend.
Pepe Coin, for example, was inspired by Pepe the Frog, while Dogecoin, was inspired by a 2013 joke between Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer.
In the digital asset landscape, these meme-coins are often created as a joke or a way to mock the serious nature of traditional cryptocurrencies – with the irony being that they can still gain and maintain significant value based on its community following.
Thursday’s sudden surge of over 16 trillion $PEPE tokens naturally created apprehension among investors, also causing a subsequent drop in its trading price.
This strangely followed what appears to be an even more alarming phenomenon – changing the number of required crypto wallets required to “sign off” on a transaction that authorizes the crypto transaction to go through.
PEPE’s multi-sig wallet, which is responsible for safeguarding a substantial portion of $PEPE tokens and is one of the largest holders of the meme coin, previously required approval from five out of eight designated wallets (5/8 signatures) to authorize any given transaction.
However, according to some “on-chain sleuths,” as reported by CoinDesk, they noted these troubling changes after the multisig wallet suddenly reduced that threshold to just two out of eight signatures (2/8 signatures).
Interestingly, this incident marked the first instance in which the project’s essential multi-sig wallet participated in sending out PEPE tokens.
Not much else is known at this time, but we will update the story as we learn more.
