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