PEPE Price Slumps as Protocol Goes on Lockdown After Exploit

The price of Pepecoin (PEPE) has continued to fluctuate since the exploit on its community channels a few days ago. 

At the time when the attack was perpetrated, the coin was trading at $0.0000009045 but over the last couple of hours, PEPE has been on a downward trend. Currently, the memecoin is trading at $0.0000008897, down by 1.38% in the past 24 hours, according to on-chain data. 

PEPE Social Channels Go on Lockdown

The unfortunate news of the exploit came with a myriad of challenges and has placed the PEPE ecosystem in a state of chaos that has mandated a lockdown. 

According to the @pepecoineth account on the on X app, the Telegram group for PEPE is currently locked down. It turned out that the old Telegram account for the group was hacked and the group was hijacked by the bad actors. Hence, all official communications has been confined to the official X account pending when the former channels can be retrieved or another account is opened  

So far, no information has been passed, users are therefore advised to remain vigilant. 

“If there are any mentions of airdrops, staking, mints, claims, etc they are all scams that will drain your wallet. Pepe is not involved with any new coins, and Pepe will never message you first. You should never connect your wallet or sign things without being careful and double checking all links and account usernames,” the PEPE team said in the issued statement on X.

16T Tokens Lost in PEPE Exploit

The Pepecoin protocol was attacked earlier this week and this led to the loss of 16 trillion PEPE tokens worth approximately $15 million at the time of the exploit. Upon investigation, it was discovered that these tokens were transferred to several exchanges including OKX, Binance, Kucoin, and Bybit. In addition, the required signer count for the memecoin’s multisig wallet was reduced to just 2 out of the original 8 wallets.

Three former team members allegedly orchestrated the theft of the PEPE tokens and this made the community begin to call the attack an insider trading scam. PEPE promoter and crypto influencer Jeremy “Pauly” Cahen announced plans to bring the perpetrators to justice.

“I’ll likely be working w/ multiple branches of law enforcement to make sure that @degenharambe & the rest of his partners on the @pepecoineth team get brought to justice as soon as possible. Their greed & crimes have caused undue harm to many,” he said in a post shared on the X app recently.