Pepe Coin (PEPE) is soaring and has become one of the most popular meme coins behind Dogecoin and Shiba Inu.
However, this wouldn’t have been the case if the Pepe Coin smart contract deployer had not chosen to do what was good for the project and, by extension, the community. The team renounced the deployer contract, sending it to a null address.
Doing this meant no one could tamper with the smart contract and effect changes that could destroy the meme coin’s credibility.
Intervening For Credibility
According to curious online sleuths, the deployer of Pepe Coin smart contracts had “god-like” powers before changes were made.
For example, the team could limit the number of token transactions, modify the maximum token trading amount, the maximum position a trader can initiate, or even suspend trading of a given address. Moreover, the smart contract included a black listing function. Subsequently, this effectively empowered the team to bar certain addresses from holding and trading the token.
With this, observers noted that Pepe Coin, though popular, wasn’t decentralized as many thought and project owners could, at any time, rug pull investors.
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 supply liquidity and buy the token. Afterward, the team leaves the project and sells their portion forcing prices lower and leaving investors holding mud.
The possibility of the team pulling out a rug pull was plugged when the deploying 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 utility. Instead, the team behind the project aimed to ride on “Pepe the Frog,” created in 2005 by Matt Furie. The meme coin project has no connection to Furie.
Pepe Coin was launched in mid-March and with little fanfare. There was no presale, and the total supply was 420.69 trillion. Days after launching, Pepe Coin exploded to be one of the most popular meme coins.
The token has surged to command a market cap of over $105 million. It has a slot in the top 300 projects by market capitalization, according to the coin tracker, CoinGecko.
At the same time, 93.1% of all PEPE in circulation were sent to a liquidity pool in Uniswap, and liquidity provider (LP) tokens were burnt. The remainder is reserved for centralized exchange listing and other initiatives.
Uniswap is one of the world’s largest decentralized exchanges facilitating the trading of tokens like PEPE, including non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on Ethereum and layer-2 protocols like Arbitrum.