In the wake of the reported theft of about 16 trillion PEPE tokens, Jeremy “Pauly” Cahen, a former Pepecoin booster turned crypto influencer, has accused the Pepecoin crew of insider trading.
Pauly is currently disclosing the identity of team members and their financial activity.
In an update on August 26, 2023 Pauly revealed that the Pepecoin team has about $16–17 million in PEPE tokens spread across nine wallets.
Unexpectedly, the insiders decided not to sell their stakes. Instead, they created a sizable short position by strategically offloading PEPE from a wallet on a centralized exchange (CEX).
“I’ll likely be working with multiple branches of law enforcement to ensure 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,” Pauly said.
Incidentally, on-chain analyst Yazan has also reported insider selling of PEPE holdings, with around 400 billion PEPE sold, aligning with Pauly’s team exposure.
Hong Kong financial secretary Paul Chan Mo-po has said that Blockchain and Web 3.0 technology will be responsible for the next big wave of growth in Hong Kong’s digital tech sector.
The next wave of digital entertainment will be led by developing industries within Web 3.0, such as non-fungible tokens (NFTs), GameFi, Play-to-Earn games, and immersive entertainment, Chan wrote in a blog post on August 27, 2023.
Chan made his comments after attending the three-day Digital Entertainment Leaders Forum, which is a Blockchain-related conference held at Hong Kong’s Cyberport. The 25-hectare mixed-use innovation and multimedia hub called Cyberport offers office space, grants, and funding to a wide range of businesses in the IT, digital entertainment, and financial sectors.
Chan also said that earlier this year he had given Cyberport an additional $50 million from this year’s budget in order to hasten the creation of a “vigorous” Web 3.0 ecosystem.
While hash rate has increased to new highs, bitcoin mining revenue, or “hash price”—a measure of dollars made per TH/s per day—has fallen to levels not seen since the collapse of FTX in November 2022.
The hash rate of the Bitcoin network reached a new peak of 414 exahashes per second (EH/s) on August 18, 2023. According to Blockchain.com, the network hash rate increased 80 per cent in the previous 12 months and 54 per cent over the beginning of 2023 at the top.
Despite the network’s apparent security, things are not so rosy for Bitcoin miners as revenue has dropped drastically, reaching levels similar to those seen in November 2022, when it reached a market cycle low of about $16,500.
HashPriceIndex further reported that revenue is just $0.060 per terahash per second per day, which is less than half of what it was in the beginning of May when the Bitcoin Ordinals inscription frenzy resulted in a high demand for block space.
Dylan LeClair, a market analyst, reacted on the declining income and hash rate peak by saying that more effective new rigs will continue to be built, “but it’s almost time for the price to outpace”.
This effectively means that prices need to increase to maintain mining profitable at such high hash rates.
