• The BALD memecoin launched on Coinbase’s Base and within hours reached an all-time high of 9 cents.
• The price then plummeted nearly 98%, leading to traders calling it a “Bald rug pull” scam, with suspicions of insider trading by Coinbase.
• Four wallets spent $1,000 to buy 50 million BALD tokens and sold 37 million for over $1 million in profits in one day.
BALD Coin Price Plummets 98% Few Hours After Launch
Bald memecoin, a newly launched meme token, saw its prices plummet nearly 98% from its newborn all-time high on July 31st. The coin was launched on Coinbase’s Base, an Ethereum layer-2 scaling solution built on OP stack and started trading on LeetSwap at 0.000002 ETH. In the span of 15 hours, the prices rallied 4.34 million percent to trade at 0.0867 ETH before falling back down again due to profit booking. On July 31st, the coin rose 106% to reach its peak price of 9 cents before crashing down again soon after.
Traders Claim Bald Rug Pulled Them
The sudden drop led traders to post their grievances on X alleging possible insider trading by Coinbase and dubbing this incident as the “Bald rug pull” scam. Crypto investor Axel Bitblaze had earlier posted a thread highlighting that substantial liquidity of the BALD token suggested institutional backing which leads him to believe that it might either be a ‘honeypot’ or a ‘rug pull’ scam.
Insider Trading & Profiteering
On-chain data analysis platform Lookonchain noted that four addresses spent $0.534 ETH ( $1,000) to buy 50 million BALD tokens within 4 minutes of launch and then sold 37 million for 554 ETH tokens ($1.04 million), netting them a profit of $1 million in a day Another user said they bought 2% of the supply and also profited heavily from it as well as hyping up the project further in order to benefit more from it as well as others who followed suit into investing in this project without proper research into it beforehand..
Suspicions Of Brian Armstrong’s Involvement
Axel Bitblaze also suggested that the project might have been initiated by an influential whale with large holdings of cbETH (Coinbase’s version of staked ETH). This has led some speculations suggesting Brian Armstrong’s involvement behind this coin although there is no direct evidence linking him yet .
Conclusion
The sudden crash in prices has left many investors disgruntled as users are still trying piece together what happened here exactly while claiming rugs against their investments made here . It is important for everyone interested in crypto investments should be aware about such scams before investing so they can protect themselves against any kind wrong doings by malicious actors within these projects .