In This Article:
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The hype around BALD token pushed prices 4,000,000% from issuance and attracted over $68 million from traders.
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Crypto sleuths have found connections between Sam Bankman-Fried's Alameda Research and BALD's deployer wallet.
The rug-pulling of short-lived, heavily hyped meme coin bald (BALD) has a whole cast of characters, but is one of them Sam Bankman-Fried?
On-chain data suggests interactions between the memecoin BALD’s deployer contract and one of the wallets tagged by Nansen as belonging to Alameda Research - the trading company founded and controlled by Bankman-Fried. The data was cited by several blockchain sleuths on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter and later validated by CoinDesk.
Wintermute’s head of research, Igor Igamberdiev, tied another wallet address 0xccFa05 to Alameda, stating its owner showed strong technical capabilities and proved to be a savvy DeFi user: Trading on the first version of dYdX and Oasis, as well as voting on the first proposals from SushiSwap.
The wallet was seemingly active on crypto exchanges Binance, FTX and Coinbase (COIN) in that period and was a heavy DeFi user, farming millions of dollars on early DeFi projects such as Yearn Finance and Cream.
However, Igamberdiev stated that while the actions seemed to be "definitely someone from Alameda," it was unlikely to be Bankman-Fried himself.
“Given the track record and the lack of contacts with other players (even 3AC actively interacted with BlockFi, Genesis, etc.), then we can point the finger toward someone from Alameda,” he tweeted, “And let's try to answer probably the most critical question, SBF or Sam Trabucco?”
Rise of BALD
Over the last weekend, the lure of meme coin fortunes in a starved market helped Coinbase’s new layer-2 blockchain Base attract some $68 million in ether (ETH) and over $200 million in trading volumes. Traders flocked to purchase bald (BALD) tokens, which jumped to $85 million market cap late on Sunday, with some traders like @cheatcoiner over $1.4 million from an initial $500 investment.