Skepticism Abounds as Pepe Team Member Offers Response to $16M Withdrawal

• Pepe has seen its market cap and popularity spike in April 2023, only to be followed by a controversial $16 million transfer.
• The team has offered a response, but it failed to restore investor confidence as no evidence was given for the claims made.
• As investors remain cautious, PEPE’s price continues to fall.

Pepe: A Memecoin Sensation

In April 2023, Pepe quickly became the latest crypto sensation, clinching a $1 billion market cap just two weeks after its launch and printing mammoth-sized gains for investors.

Controversial Withdrawal

Following recent questionable activity around the project’s multi-sig wallet, however, investor confidence has plummeted. Last week saw a jarring transfer of $16 million worth of PEPE from the project’s multi-sig wallet to exchanges – an action that is now subjecting the memecoin to high levels of skepticism.

Project Team Responds

A member of the Pepe team has issued a statement on Twitter in response to growing concerns over this incident. This individual accused three other unidentified team members of being behind the transfer and claimed they have now relinquished access to the project and erased their social media presence. Furthermore, they asserted that the remaining 10 trillion PEPE in the multi-sig wallet is now safe and will eventually be burned most of them.

Investor Uncertainty Remains

The statement from the project team has done little to restore investor confidence as blockchain consultant Martin Krung called it “made up” while other prominent figures expressed similar sentiments on Twitter. It appears that investors are still not convinced about what happened or who is really responsible for these moves with many taking a wait-and-see approach before investing in Pepe again.

Price Decline Continues

Amidst this continued uncertainty surrounding Pepe, its price continues to decline; at time of writing it trades at $0.000000868255 representing a 3.6% drop over 24 hours and 21% decline over 7 days per CoinGecko data