Memecoin Bald ($BALD) has been in the news recently for its short-lived price hike which was eventually followed by a dramatic rugpull. This time, speculations abound over the token’s links to Alameda Research, the trading company founded by Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF).
On-chain data has revealed the memecoin’s deployer contract interacting with one of the wallets tagged by Nansen, possibly belonging to Alameda.
This piece of information was heavily shared by several blockchain sleuths across the social media platform X (previously known as Twitter). One of them was Wintermute’s head of research, Igor Igamberdiev, who also found links of another wallet address – 0xccFa05 – to Alameda.
Upon Igamberdiev’s investigations, it was found that the owner of this wallet showed strong technical capabilities and proved to be a savvy DeFi user. This included activities such as trading on the first version of dYdX and Oasis, as well as voting on the first proposals from SushiSwap.
This address, which held “incredible amount of funds”, also used some of the top exchanges like Binance, FTX, Coinbase, Kraken and more.
During this period, the wallet was active in the DeFi space too, farming millions of dollars on early DeFi projects such as Yearn Finance and Cream.
While Igamberdiev was quite sure about his findings, he did mention that while these actions seemed to be “definitely someone from Alameda,” it was unlikely to be Bankman-Fried himself. Talking about the same, he said: “Given the track record and the lack of contacts with other players (even 3AC actively interacted with BlockFi, Genesis, etc.), then we can point the finger toward someone from Alameda. And let’s try to answer probably the most critical question, SBF or Sam Trabucco?”
On top of this, Sam Bankman-Fried is also facing the US government’s criminal case accusing the FTX cryptocurrency exchange founder of orchestrating a multibillion-dollar fraud when the platform collapsed last year.
As he stands in bail now, his access to the net is heavily controlled and restricted to a selection of news, sports, and educational websites.
Chances of SBF being the one behind Alameda-controlled wallet was all the more unlikely as his parents have been made to sign affidavits attesting to ensure that Bankman-Fried is not allowed to use their devices. The former FTX executive itself has been restricted to using a flip phone too.
The popularity of memecoin $BALD had attracted much attention last Sunday amassing a $50million market capitalisation in less than six hours. This took the token to a $85m capitalisation where its price rise was a 4,000,000% surge from issuance to peak.
However, this frenzy did not last long as on Monday, 31 July, the token plunged as much as 90%. In less than 24 hours, the token’s deployer removed millions of dollars worth of liquidity, causing $BALD to nosedive.
At the time of press, the memecoin was down by 88%, trading at $0.00618, which was over 93% from its recent all-time high of $0.0938 as per CoinGecko.
