The popularity of memecoin Bald ($BALD), which amassed a $50million market capitalisation in less than six hours last Sunday, did not last long. Today, Monday 31 July, the token has plunged as much as 90%.
$BALD, which is funded by Coinbase staked Ether (cbETH) on its newly developed Base network, enjoyed what is called a ‘bull market speedrun’ after being hyped by influencers on Twitter. However, such tweets, which are commonly known as ‘calls’ colloquially, are made only to dump them on unsuspecting followers at higher prices.
The popularity that ensued took the memecoin to a $85m capitalisation late on Sunday where its price rose by over 4,000,000% from issuance.
However, in less than 24 hours after this, the token’s deployer removed millions of dollars worth of liquidity, causing $BALD to nosedive. In the early European hours of Monday, the token held as much as $32m Ether ($ETH). It even surpassed $100m in volumes. However, its prices fell to 1 cent from 9 cents once the deployer did the shift in millions.
At the time of press, prices seemed to recover marginally as the deployer was adding liquidity in smaller batches of Ether. On the flip side, panicked holders continued to sell tokens simultaneously.
The hype which started on Twitter was possibly driven by the use of cbETH, which started speculations among crypto trading circles about the token likely created being issued by someone at Coinbase.
Interestingly, the memecoin frenzy on Coinbase’s layer-2 blockchain started before the network went live officially. The testnet of Base, which is built by crypto exchange Coinbase on OP Stack, was launched in January. It was opened to builders only in mid-July.
It attracted only a few DEXs which went live on the layer, until when the tides shifted last weekend. This happened when the frenzy surrounding $BALD led to a sudden rush in capital, as well as users to the blockchain.
Coinbase describes Base as an Ethereum layer-2 chain that offers a safe, low-cost, developer-friendly way to build on-chain. It is built on the OP Stack in collaboration with Optimism. The team described its vision for the future saying: “We’re incubating Base inside of Coinbase, leveraging the last decade of our experience building crypto products, and plan to progressively decentralise the chain over time. We currently do not plan to issue a new network token.”
Base boasts about being secured by Ethereum, with seamless access to multiple Coinbase product integrations, full and cheap EVM compatibility, and a decentralised, permissionless, and open source platform.
As per CoinGecko, the price of $BALD stood at $0.0212 at the time of press, representing a 57.84% price decline in the last 24 hours.
