BALD token developer denies rug pull as price falls 85% post-launch

A new memecoin on Coinbase’s Base network fell 85% after its developer allegedly pulled 1,034 Ether in liquidity, worth approximately $1.9 million, from the market, according to social media reports and blockchain data. The developer for Bald (BALD) denied making any market sales of the coin, stating, “[I] just added/removed 2 sided liquidity and bought.”

Watching the $BALD chart pic.twitter.com/2lc0HEVlNu

— Whale (@WhaleChart) July 31, 2023

Coinbase’s Base network was launched for builders on July 13. However, its development team has urged ordinary users not to use the network, as it lacks a functioning user interface (UI) for its bridge. The team plans to officially release the network to users in August, at which point a bridge UI will be made available.

Despite these warnings, some investors have sought early returns by buying up assets on the network before it is officially launched. They’ve done so by using development tools to bridge Ether (ETH) from Ethereum to Base without a UI.

On July 29, a pseudonymous developer with the Twitter handle “Bald” announced the launch of the BALD token on Base at address 0x27D2DECb4bFC9C76F0309b8E88dec3a601Fe25a8.

The token gained 289,000% within the first 14 hours of trading. But on July 31, Twitter users began reporting that the token’s deployer account had removed 1,034 ETH in liquidity, causing its price to fall to nearly zero.

$BALD deployer just removed 1034 ETH from Liquidity

Others removed 6,800 eth and 1800 ETH from liq as well https://t.co/A2357QUF0H pic.twitter.com/4lH8LHxv2v

— notEezzy (@notEezzy) July 31, 2023

In a social media post, the BALD developer denied selling tokens through a market order, stating, “I didn’t sell a single token at any point since deployment. Just added/removed 2 sided liquidity and bought.” In response, one coin collector argued that adding two-sided liquidity is, in fact, selling tokens, to which the BALD developer replied, “correct.”

Blockchain data reveals that the BALD token was deployed by account 0xccfa0530b9d52f970d1a2daea670ce58e4176389, which removed 1,009.41 Wrapped Ether (WETH) in liquidity at 12:13 pm UTC on July 31.

Investors have lost significant sums from failed memecoin launches recently. On July 26, over $2 million was lost following the launch of Pond0x, which allegedly contained a faulty transfer function that allowed any user to transfer another user’s tokens without consent.