Incident All ledgers
PEPE: $15.1m
PEPE lost $15.1m on 26 August 2023. Ranked 155th of 1,272 crypto failures, with method, returned funds and comparable incidents.
- Date
- 26 August 2023
- Lost
- $15.1m
- Returned or repaid
- None recorded
- Target
- Token
- Category
- Rugpull
- Method
- Admin Drain
- Chains
- Ethereum
PEPE team insiders lowered the project multisig's signing threshold from five-of-eight to two-of-eight, moved about 16 trillion PEPE tokens to centralized exchanges for roughly $15M net, then removed themselves as signers and deleted social accounts.
Against the ledger
- It ranks 155th of the 1,272 incidents with a known loss, and 18th in 2023.
- It accounts for 25.2% of the $59.9m in known losses in August 2023.
- 40 incidents in the ledger are classified as Rugpull, for $284.7m in total. This one is 5.3% of that.
- The ledger records no returned funds.
Closest in size by the same method
| Date | Target | Lost | Type | Method | Returned |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 20 Feb 2019 | Coinbin | $26.0m | CEX | Admin Drain | — |
| 02 Aug 2023 | Bald | $23.0m | DeFi Protocol | Liquidity Rug | — |
| 25 Nov 2021 | Snowdog | $18.1m | DeFi Protocol | Liquidity Rug | — |
| 02 Dec 2020 | Compounder Finance | $12.5m | DeFi Protocol | Admin Drain | — |
| 04 Jan 2022 | Arbix Finance | $10.0m | DeFi Protocol | Admin Drain | — |
All failures in 2023 · The failures ledger
Amounts are DefiLlama’s estimates and can change as incidents are revalued. Its returned figure can include money a company repaid itself, not only funds recovered from attackers. Source: DefiLlama.
Cite this Bitminer.io, “PEPE, failures ledger”, data to 2 November 2026, https://bitminer.io/ledger/incident/pepe-2023-08-26/. How this is built