Millions of dollars worth of the PEPE meme coin flooded crypto exchanges Thursday, spooking investors who drove its price down and drawing attention to spooky action in the project’s multisig, among the single-largest holders of the joke cryptocurrency.
Over 16 trillion tokens flowed out of the PEPE multisig wallet midday Thursday on its way to addresses associated with Binance, OXK, and Bybit. That action came shortly after on-chain sleuths noted troubling changes to the oversight of how that vault-like wallet handles transaction approvals.
Instead of requiring five of eight wallets to sign off on transactions, it had changed to only two out of eight.
The highly unusual action represented the first time the project’s all-important multisig – keeper of much of the token’s supply – has ever sent out the meme coin.
PEPE’s price plunged after the actions came to light, down 15% as of press time.
UPDATE (Aug. 24, 2023, 23:44 UTC): Updates PEPE’s percentage decline.