BALD Coin Rug Pull: How $100M Memecoin Became Worthless Overnight
On July 30, a memecoin called BaldBaseBald (BALD) was launched on the Base Network. Within two days, the token had a market cap of $100 million, with over $25 million in liquidity. However, the token's meteoric rise proved to be a classic case of market manipulation, with BaldBaseBald, the deployer behind the token, rug-pulling the token, causing its price to plummet by 85%.
Market researcher Thiccy indexed all transactions by Bald deployers and found stories of malicious market behavior. BaldBaseBald added over 6,700 ETH to the pool in the first 24 hours, or over $12.5 million worth of liquidity, an astonishing amount of capital for a new on-chain meme coin.
The action by the deployers is certainly bullish for speculators, with many speculating that Brian Armstrong created the token to fuel the hype. However, once deployers stop adding liquidity to the pool, the price stagnates and crashes.
After 24 hours, deployers started bidding on BALD again, causing the price to double. The deployer then withdrew more than 10,500 Ethereum (ETH), or nearly $20 million worth of liquidity, causing an 85% drop in the value of the token.
Thiccy’s analysis shows that after adding 6,870 ETH, buying 1,360 ETH at an average price of 0.0004, and withdrawing 10,704 ETH, the deployer’s net profit was 2,789 ETH, or $5.2 million. As for BaldBase Bald has removed the remaining liquidity, bringing its total profit and loss (PnL) to 3,163 ETH, or $5.9 million.
(Data source: Ronaldo Marquez)