Binance Listed Popular Altcoin Drops Hard! Rug Pull?

Pepe (PEPE), which debuted in April and soon found its way to most centralized exchanges, including Binance, is on the agenda with rug pull claims. Altcoin price is preparing for the weekend with 20% decline. Allegedly, the project team was behind the sales. Details are as follows…

Binance-listed PEPE is on the agenda with rug pull claims

Triggering a new meme coin bull in 2023, PEPE has been falling out of favor lately. After reaching the top 50 cryptocurrencies in a short time, it started to lose its momentum. At the time of writing, it is trading at #98 with a market cap of $350,000. The popular meme token has slumped over 20% after the transfers revealed last night. According to the findings, sales were made by wallets associated with the project team.

According to the latest data from Etherscan, the PEPE team’s wallet has moved about 16 trillion PEPE (equivalent to about $15.08 million) to four cryptocurrency exchanges (CEX). As a result, the altcoin price dropped more than 15% for two days in a row.

It also switched from a 5/8 configuration to a 2/8-only configuration in the PEPE multi-signature wallet. About 6.9% (29 trillion) of the PEPE tokens in the team’s wallet flowed into CEXs, a total of 18.3 trillion.

Did PEPE rug pull?

There is still no clarity behind the latest developments. But investors remain concerned about another contention-type event here. A rug pull refers to a deceptive scheme by which the developer of a cryptocurrency or NFT project promotes the venture to attract investment, but then suddenly shuts down or disappears so that investors flee from their assets.

Some analysts such as @ethx_o speculate that this may not be a rug pull situation. According to the analyst: “More than 2.5% of PEPE is owned by OKX and Binance alone. In other words, five of the six largest investors are stock markets. Also circulating supply = maximum supply. So there is minimal risk here for the traditional rug pull. Pepe belongs to the community”.

As we quoted as Kriptokoin.com, other experts strongly argue that the event was a rug pull. Since last night, a large amount of PEPE has been flowing to the central exchanges with abnormally large transactions. PEPE, which shared transactions on Binance in May, is currently in a sharp downward wave.

new claims

Well-known figure in the PEPE community @Pauly0x shared on X to reveal the identity of the person behind the project. Accordingly, the person behind PEPE is none other than Zachary Testa, who, apart from the original founder, operates under the accounts @degenharambe and @LordKekLol. Zachary, who lives in Arizona, USA, rose to fame with his PEPE earnings of $865,000. Meanwhile, @Matt_Furie, the creator of the original Pepe the Frog meme, has reportedly not received any compensation from the PEPE team.

Born in 1997, Zachary Testa graduated from Arizona State University with a degree in marketing in 2018. @Pauly0x also explained that Zachary played a pivotal role in connecting the PEPE team to Binance, one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges in the world, leading to the listing of memecoin on the platform.

Besides Zachary Testa, the PEPE team consists of three other members whose Telegram usernames are @billyoptions, @zerozevia and @ekim222. The deletion of these identifiers in particular raises more questions about the intentions and actions of the PEPE team.

PEPE price melts 40% on Binance

PEPE is currently trading around $0.000000868897, which has lost over 15% on its second day. The Binance-listed coin has been faltering following a bearish trend for several months. It is quite likely to test previous lows around $0.0000008 in June. Therefore, short-term forecasts point to a negative outlook.

But the basics continue to look good. According to Etherscan, the token’s investor count is steadily increasing, despite the lack of significant price increases, approaching an impressive 140,000. It seems that individual investors continue to buy PEPE. As the value of PEPE falls further, more investors may enter the market willing to buy the dip. Binance is one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges providing volume to Pepe.