$8 million worth of PEPE tokens in the address have been blacklisted by the developers and will be permanently locked.

Engineers discovered a blacklist function in PEPE's smart contract, which will prevent addresses from receiving and sending tokens.

PEPE Token with 18000% Return Frozen

A tweet by software engineer Cygaar on Twitter has garnered attention, revealing that a contract address has been blacklisted by the developers of PEPE. This address holds around 2.5 trillion PEPE tokens, currently valued at around $8 million. The blacklisted address is permanently locked and cannot receive or send any tokens anymore.

The address purchased 2.5 trillion PEPE tokens for 0.013 ETH within hours of PEPE being listed on the Uniswap trading pair. However, just 8 minutes after the transaction was completed, it was blacklisted. The blacklisted contract cannot be altered and only has a function to destroy tokens, not mint them.

Why Was the Address Blacklisted?

Speculation below the post suggests that perhaps only the project team and internal personnel could purchase before the trading pair was open to the public, and this address might not have been an internal person, purchasing ahead of the development team and subsequently getting blacklisted by the contract.

This is all because they bought all tokens for themslf. The blacklistd addres probably was an outsider

Pool launched with %93 of all supply + 2 ETH

That means, first 2 ETH size purchase buys ~46% of the token supply

First buyers hold the majority of spply. Who they're u think?

— Bora | ボラ | 𐰉𐰆𐰺𐰀 (@bora_ozenbirkan) May 5, 2023

Others pointed out that blacklisted contracts are typically designed to prevent insider trading and avoid whale control over the majority of the supply.It is worth mentioning that the developers have abandoned the permissions of the blacklisted contract, rendering it unable to be modified again through upgrades or other means, making this the only blacklisted account.

PEPE's 24-Hour Spot Trading Volume Exceeds $29 Billion, Only Behind BTC, ETH, and Stablecoins

According to CoinMarketCap data, PEPE's trading volume on centralized exchanges (CEX) reached $29 billion within 24 hours, trailing only BTC, ETH, USDT, and USDC, with a daily increase of about 35.1% (as of 5/8 18:00).

PEPE's largest trading volume is on OKX, reaching $645 million, making it the highest traded coin in the USDT trading pair on OKX in nearly 24 hours, even surpassing the total trading volumes of BTC and ETH.

Contract trading volumes are mainly concentrated on Binance, with a trading volume exceeding $1.9 billion in the last 24 hours, trailing only BTC and ETH.