Everyone agrees: rug pull BALD has brought an end to Base’s layer-2-based memecoin token.
However, on the morning of August 1st, the crypto community on Twitter became active again when a series of Twitter accounts offered evidence ranging from text to on-chain data stating that BALD’s dev is related to the former CEO of FTX Sam Bankman-Fried.
On-chain evolution of the memecoin BALD rug pullevent
On July 18, 2023, Arkham Intelligence officially airdropped users of their platform, as previously announced. The airdrop is open to users of this on-chain platform prior to the 7/8 snapshot, inviting others to use Arkham through a referral link. Airdrop criteria will be based on points collected by users through referral activity.
- source: SushiSwap
Arkham’s ARKM token (ARKM) is the native token of Arkham Intelligence. The ARKM token is used to pay for data and analysis on the platform and also serves as a token to participate in governance. ARKM token holders can vote on the platform’s proposals and participate in the decision-making process.
On July 24, the community mostly paid attention to the information surrounding the Worldcoin “retina scan” project when this project launched the WLD token today and will be listed by a series of major exchanges such as Binance, OKX, Bybit, Huobi,…According to data from DefiLlama, Coinbase’s layer-2 Base experienced a significant TVL growth of $11.71 million within 24 hours, resulting in an increase of 10,113%. This sharp and sudden increase in TVL can be seen as the result of a series of memecoin and shitcoin projects created on this chain, notably the BALD token.
BALD token price push process
– This token was operated by many wallets with remarkable value on July 29:
– Wallet 0xccFa…176389 adds 12.14 million USD to the liquidity pool. This wallet is said to be from the Dev team.
0x31f5…226e and 0x0b14…2a36 bought in at 1.88 million USD.
0x3300…617e also made deposits up to 500,000 to Base and bet it all on BALD.
– The BALD contract implementer then added 6,700 ETH ($12.5 million) of liquidity to the newly created BALD/WETH pool on LeetSwap to invite the community to trade.
With the appearance of a new layer-2 that does not have many applications, and has limited liquidity when Base still does not have a specialized cross-chain solution to connect to Ethereum, it has to use a “one-way bridge” instead. Afternoon” is to send money directly to layer-2 smart contract, BALD had the opportunity to “roll around”, increase in value 30,000 times and reach a capitalization of more than 36 million USD in less than a day thanks to the FOMO wave of crypto community on Twitter, from both major KOLs and general users.
Not only that, many wallet addresses that have been associated with rug pull on other chains also find their way to Base so they can “get used to the old way”. According to Scopescan, an address has issued up to 29 meme-coins on Base and scammed them all, earning $ 1.07 million from the initial investment of only $ 103 thousand.
BALD got the rug pulled in just 3 hours
However, around 07:30 PM on July 31, the person behind the BALD token withdrew 10,705 ETH ($20 million) and 224.6 million BALD from the BALD/WETH liquidity pool on Base’s LeetSwap DEX, driving down the price token value to 85% in just a few seconds.
Contrary to what was said, at around 09:50 PM, the BALD/WETH pool once withdrew all of its liquidity. As a result, the value of BALD dropped by 98% within 3 hours and returned to the pre-pump price zone.
Currently, there is only $61,000 of liquidity left for the token with a market cap of $4.8 million.
- source: DeBank
The coincidence between BALD and Sam Bankman-Fried accounts
If you do not know, the wallet address 0xccFa0530B9d52f970d1A2dAEa670ce58E4176389 previously deposited more than 12 million USD into the liquidity pool and is believed to belong to the Dev team. The interesting thing about this wallet is not only the rug pull but the fact that if you look at the transactions, this wallet is related to many notable previous transactions.
Contact to SushiSwap in the early days: address 0xccFa…176389 was very active on SushiSwap when this DEX was launched in August 2020, participating in many voting activities.
The founder of SushiSwap, Chef Nomi, until September of the same year, pulled his own DEX floor. At that time, wallet address 0xccfa withdrew 326.38 million USD from FTX to transfer to SushiSwap.
Looking back at the words from Nomi’s tweet, one Twitter account found many similarities and suggested that Chef Nomi could be Sam Bankman-Fried and that the SushiSwap rug pull action was also Sam’s “self-composed”.
Interaction with Alameda Research: In fact, the 0xccfa wallet does not interact directly with the Alameda Research wallet, but through another wallet, 0x000f…07790, with a timeframe of 2021-2022.
Looking at the 0x000 wallet transaction with Alameda Research, it is clear that this is not an ordinary individual’s wallet when the volume is in the tens of millions of dollars. 0xccfa when depositing assets on the Binance exchange will be via wallet 0x6663…0b54. This deposit wallet also receives money from wallet 0x000.
Crypto’s Roles in Peer-to-Peer Lending
What is on-chain data? 8 On-Chain Analysis Tools in 2023
