PEPE account blamed former team members for 16 trillion-token transfer

On August 26, 2023, the official PEPE account attributed a 16.045 trillion-token transfer from the memecoin project’s treasury multisignature wallet to three former team members, saying they had taken the tokens and sent them toward centralized exchanges. The public Ethereum record verifies the transfer and an immediate reduction in the wallet’s approval threshold. It does not identify the human signers or independently prove the account’s accusation.

That distinction was central to the event. The disclosure supplied an explanation for unusual transactions first seen on August 24, but it came from an anonymous remaining project representative with control of PEPE’s communications and remaining treasury. The development mattered because a wallet promoted as a safeguard had become the mechanism for a large, unexpected movement of project-controlled supply.

What the chain establishes

Ethereum transaction `0x97902522…` was confirmed at 20:34:23 UTC on August 24, 2023. Etherscan records 16,045,176,486,728.9 PEPE moving from Safe address `0x5BdEA820…` to `0xa34B0919…`. The receiving address then divided the tokens among four addresses in transactions confirmed over the following minutes.

A second Safe transaction was confirmed at 20:37:47 UTC, 204 seconds after the large transfer. Its input called the Safe contract’s threshold-changing function with a new value of two. Contemporaneous reporting described the configuration as moving from five required signatures out of eight owners to two out of eight.

Those facts are independently observable. Exchange labels attached to destination addresses supported contemporaneous reports that the routes led to OKX, Binance, KuCoin and Bybit, but labels are curated attribution rather than confirmations from the exchanges. Once assets reach a centralized exchange, the public chain also cannot show whether, when or by whom they were sold on an internal order book.

What the PEPE account claimed

The project statement, posted at 02:49 UTC on August 26, said three former team members had accessed the multisignature wallet, taken 16 trillion PEPE—about 60% of the wallet’s roughly 26 trillion tokens—and sent the assets to exchanges to sell. It described the moved tokens as worth roughly $15 million at the time. That dollar figure was the project’s contemporaneous estimate, not a Coinburn valuation; different reports produced different values because PEPE’s price moved and their measurement times differed.

The statement further alleged that the three people removed themselves from project accounts and left the remaining representative in control. It said roughly 10 trillion PEPE remained and would be moved to another wallet until needed for project expenses, donations or a burn.

Coinburn treats each assertion about motive, authorization, sale and individual responsibility as an attributable claim. The signers were not publicly identified in the statement, no law-enforcement finding accompanied it, and a blockchain signature proves that a key authorized a transaction—not who operated the key or whether the action constituted theft.

Why the governance failure mattered

A multisignature wallet reduces dependence on one key only when its signer selection, threshold and operating rules produce meaningful separation of authority. The August 24 sequence showed the limits of that protection. Multiple valid signatures could still authorize a transfer that the project’s remaining representative later disavowed, and lowering the threshold left the remaining treasury subject to fewer approvals.

For token holders, the issue was not merely the dollar value. PEPE had no conventional corporate disclosure system, named management or enforceable treasury policy visible to the public. Market participants therefore had to interpret an anonymous social-media statement alongside immutable but identity-blind transaction data.

As of August 26, the defensible conclusion was narrow: 16.045 trillion PEPE had left the team Safe, the approval threshold had been reduced to two, and the official account blamed former insiders. Whether the tokens were stolen, who controlled the signing keys and how much was ultimately sold remained unverified.