Check out how the allegedly biggest scam of 2023 so far happened below.

A. The start of $BALD and source of funding:

1. The start of $BALD:

• address 0xccfa minted 1B $BALD on the Base chain, Coinbase's new Layer 2 built on Optimism on July 29.
• 0xccfa then added 8,163 $ETH ($15.2M) and 727M $BALD of liquidity to the newly created BALD/WETH pool on LeetSwap for trading between July 29 and 30.
• TXID: 0x581e0a28d767c7275072fd2135b331147c83b0933959473816c01bfd147c6761
• token contract: 0x27d2decb4bfc9c76f0309b8e88dec3a601fe25a8

2. The source of funding for the $BALD creator wallet mostly came from FTX, Coinbase, and Binance:

• received the first 0.5 ETH from FTX on Dec 17, 2021
• withdrew 84.35K $ETH ($126.58M) from FTX between May 14 and Nov 07, 2022
• withdrew 26.297K $ETH ($48.25M) from Coinbase between Apr 26 to Jul 14, 2023
• withdrew 104.197K $ETH ($183M) and deposited 80.972K $ETH ($136M) from/to Binance between Sep 7, 2022, to Aug 1, 2023

B. Early buyers and the pump on $BALD:

B1. Early buyers of $BALD include:

4 addresses jointly swapped 0.53 $ETH for 50M $BALD (5% of total supply) within mins after $BALD started trading:

• they simultaneously withdrew 0.534 $ETH from Bybit to fund the purchases so likely belong to one insider
• then sold all at the pump and earned 778 $ETH ($1.43M) in total.

• address 1: 0x95CabFF33049a0Ea34f26Ca3D797D1D818b46Fb7
• address 2: 0x5a608B8a56ABb71cd7D2cB68e656cA669Bc1E4B0
• address 3: 0x2Eb0a3591f0CAE962202E8A1F28931af8d6304c8
• address 4: 0x590D731Da879cc05BD15443d95949C6ceDE64CB3

B2. FOMO on $BALD began:

1. 0x330 swapped 266.4 $ETH ($489K) to 10M $BALD on July 30 at $0.0489

• sold all later for 407.8 $ETH and earned 141.4 $ETH ($260K)
• address: 0x3300f6a0845258216e705d2abbe211c2c400617e

2. 0x0b14 swapped 999.6 $ETH ($1.83M) for 28M $BALD on Jul 30 at $.0.065

• received 1,000 $ETH from $PEPE whale 0x31f that holds 2.7T $PEPE ($3.35M)

• still holds all (now worth $171K or 93.5 $ETH) and is at a significant loss of $1.66M or 906.1 $ETH
• address: 0x0b141475df19d59e7dfdc88253379309577e2a36

3. Overall impact:

• $BALD price surged to an all-time high of $0.093869 within just 3 hours.
• The layer-2 Base also experienced a TVL growth of $11.7M (+10K%), within 24 hours due to the FOMO (refer here).

C. The fall of $BALD:

1. The first rug pull on July 31, 11.38 UTC:

• $BALD deployer withdrew 10,705 ETH ($20M) and 224.6M $BALD from the BALD/WETH liquidity pool, making $BALD price drop by 85% in a few seconds.
• he then bought 29.7M $BALD with 1,160 $ETH ($2.16M) and added 500 $ETH ($917K) and 29M $BALD back to the pool.

2. The second rug pull on July 31, 14.54 UTC:

• $BALD creator once again withdrew 434.9 $ETH of liquidity.
• $BALD price drop 98% within 3 hours.

3. In total, the creator bridged 9,385 $ETH to Base, and now holds 12,392 $ETH, earning 3K $ETH ($5.5M) in 2 days.

D. Speculations against the rug puller behind $BALD:

• FTX/Alameda’s personnel or Sam Bankman-Fried himself is rumored to be responsible for this rug-pull.
• this is based on the huge fund of 84.35K $ETH ($126.58M) that $BALD creator withdrew from FTX exchange between May 14 and Nov 07, 2022 mentioned above. However, this assumption seems not strong enough.
• address: 0xccfa0530b9d52f970d1a2daea670ce58e4176389