Pepe Coin (PEPE) is skyrocketing and has become one of the most popular meme coins behind Dogecoin and Shiba Inu.
However, this would not have been the case if smart contract deployer Pepe Coin had not chosen to do what was right for the project and, by extension, the community. The team waived the deployment contract by sending it to a null address.
This meant that no one could tamper with the smart contract and make changes that could destroy the credibility of the coin meme.
Intervene for credibility
According to Curious Online detectivessmart contract deployer Pepe Coin had “godlike” powers before changes were made.
For example, the team could limit the number of token transactions, change the maximum token trading amount, the maximum position a trader can initiate, or even suspend trading of a given address. Additionally, the smart contract included a blacklist feature. Subsequently, this effectively allowed the team to ban certain addresses from holding and trading the token.
With this, observers noted that Pepe Coin, although popular, was not decentralized as many owners of thoughts and projects could attract investors at any time.
A rug pull is a common scam in decentralized finance (DeFi) where a team builds a project, in this case Pepe Coin, convinces users to provide liquidity and buy the token. Then the team quits the project and sells its share, forcing prices down and leaving investors in the mud.
The possibility of the team pulling a rug was blocked when the deployment smart contract was sent to a null address on April 14.
The rise of Pepe Coin
Pepe Coin is a meme coin that has no use. Instead, the team behind the project aimed to roll to “Pepe the Frog,” created in 2005 by Matt Furie. The Meme Pieces Project has no connection to Fury.
Pepe Coin launched in mid-March and with little fanfare. There was no presale and the total supply was 420.69 trillion. A few days after its launch, Pepe Coin exploded into one of the most popular meme coins.
The token surged to reach a market cap of over $105 million. It has a place in the top 300 projects by market capitalization, according to the coin tracker, CoinGecko.
At the same time, 93.1% of all PEPEs in circulation were sent to a liquidity pool in Uniswap, and the liquidity provider (LP) tokens were burned. The rest is reserved for centralized stock exchange listing and other initiatives.
Uniswap is one of the largest decentralized exchanges in the world facilitating the trading of tokens like PEPE, including non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on Ethereum and layer 2 protocols like Arbitrum.
Feature image from Canva, chart from TradingView
