Memecoin PEPE Plunges Deeply Due to Series of Exchange Transfers

The memecoin PEPE has plummeted nearly 16% in the past 4 hours following the discovery of a series of transactions transferring funds from the project's wallet to several major exchanges.

Memecoin PEPE Price Drops Sharply Due to Series of Exchange Transfers. Image: The Block

In the early hours of August 25, the cryptocurrency community identified suspicious changes regarding the Pepe (PEPE) memecoin project's wallet.

Reportedly, over 16 trillion PEPE tokens (accounting for 3.8% of the total supply) were transferred from the project's multisig wallet to exchanges such as Binance, KuCoin, and Bybit.

Moreover, Pepe's multisig wallet adjusted the number of required signatures for transactions from 5/8 to 2/8.

Currently, the Pepe project's wallet holds only 10.67 trillion tokens.

These unusual transactions have left the crypto community puzzled, resulting in PEPE's price plummeting by nearly 16% in just a few hours. Combined with the fact that the latest tweet from Pepe's official account was two weeks ago, many speculate that the Pepe team may have initiated a soft rug pull.

1-hour chart of PEPE/USDT pair on Binance at 08:35 AM on August 25, 2023

PEPE emerged as a memecoin back in April 2023, reaching a market capitalization of up to $1.5 billion at one point, but has since dropped to just $385 million.

Other memecoins have not been significantly affected by the news, except for HarryPotterObamaSonic10Inu (BITCOIN).

Statistics of top memecoins in the cryptocurrency market as of 09:00 AM on August 25, 2023. Image: CoinGecko