Become a millionaire overnight, then broke again: Just yesterday, the headline made the rounds about a small investor who got rich with a $500 investment in the memecoin Bald. Today: the rude awakening. After a 300,000 percent price increase in 24 hours, the coin has now completely disappeared. The tracks lead to an old friend: Sam Bankman-Fried, founder of FTX. He is awaiting trial in house arrest in the United States for one of the supposedly worst financial frauds in US history. Is he behind the exit scam?
“I’m 99 percent sure that either someone from Alameda, FTX or SBF himself is behind it,” Adam Cochran told Decrypt. He is a partner at Cinneamhain Ventures. He later tweeted: “Apparently even some of the people at FTX assume it was Sam.” The assessment can now be read by many on Twitter, the evidence is condensing.
“Bald Deployer DYDX’s posts sound like SBF’s,” tweeted the pseudonymous Investor Hype. The on-chain activity would match Bankman-Fried’s court and bail data.
A Redditor writes: BALD developer’s wallet is said to have more than two years of deposits from FTX and Alameda, currently 12,331 Ethereum worth $22 million. The address that frequently makes deposits into his Binance wallet appears to be the same one that triggered Terra USD’s catastrophic depeg in May 2022, also attributed to Sam Bankman-Fried.
Some disagree with the theory that it was SBF. Tiffany Fong, who has visited him several times while under house arrest, points out that he has not had access to a regular laptop or cell phone while under house arrest since April 2023, and has very restricted access to the internet.
In the meantime, the anonymous developer has spoken out on Twitter. He denies all allegations that it is a rug pull: “I haven’t sold a single token since the launch. I just added and removed two-way liquidity.”
Bitcoiner Nic Carter writes, “It’s consensus that this SOON thing was an ex-Alameda employee. This is so brazen and encourages me that everyone associated with this organization deserves jail, not just SBF. The corruption is systemic.”
The memes on Twitter were not long in coming:
BALD was the first memecoin on Coinbase’s Layer2 blockchain, dubbed Base. It is traded on decentralized exchanges, such as Pancakeswap. Its liquidity has collapsed by 90 percent. Our Invest Podcast moderator Peter Büscher says he has never seen a chart like this before.
“The abrupt corrections, which are close to 100 percent, are very noticeable. In addition, there is the almost identical repetition of this pattern in four executions. This chart just doesn’t look natural and definitely not a sustainable project.”
Sam Bankman-Fried is the founder of FTX, once the second largest crypto exchange in the world. In November 2022 it collapsed. Allegations of fraud were made, with damage in the billions. SBF now face up to 115 years in prison. His trial will begin in fall 2023.
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