TL;DR
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Some folks believe Sam Bankman-Fried was behind the recent $BALD token scam.
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The $BALD meme coin launched on Monday and quickly shot up in price. Once it was up, the developer behind the project drained 90% of the liquidity pool.
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Cinneamhain Ventures partner Adam Cochran said “I am 99% sure that it is either someone from Alameda, FTX, or SBF himself.”
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While others are pointing the finger away from Sam.
Full Story
Sam Bankman-Fried is currently under house arrest with limited access to the internet.
…but some believe he’s secretly returned to the crypto space, to scam folks out of their money once again.
Here’s how a bunch of internet sleuths have come to that conclusion:
ICYMI on Monday, a new meme coin ($BALD) entered the market and quickly shot up in price.
Once it was up, the developer behind the project drained 90% of the liquidity pool.
What does that mean exactly?
Let’s start here…
If you’ve ever sold out of one crypto token into another – you’ve used a liquidity pool.
See, when you trade out of something like $BALD token, into another token like (say, $ETH) – you’re not actually trading with another person.
Finding a buyer for the exact amount $BALD you want to sell in a short amount of time would be near impossible – so instead, you’re trading with an automated liquidity pool.
It goes like this:
Say someone takes $1000 worth of Ethereum (ETH) and uses it to buy $BALD.
That $1000 worth of ETH is added to the $BALD liquidity pool, and the buyer is given $1K worth of $BALD tokens in return.
When/if someone sells their $BALD tokens, they’re essentially selling them back to the liquidity pool, in exchange for some of the pool’s store of ETH.
And draining a token’s liquidity pool is an age old scam in the crypto space.
It plays out like this:
A developer creates a coin → hypes it up → gets a whole bunch of folks to buy in → which grows the liquidity pool → the dev then uses their admin access to transfer all of the crypto out the liquidity pool, into their own wallet.
As a result, anyone holding the coin can’t trade it into anything else (because the store of cash that’s meant to support these trades is gone).
Now, here’s where SBF comes into play:
Cinneamhain Ventures partner Adam Cochran did some digging and discovered that the wallet address of the $BALD developer is a wallet that was involved in the early days of the Sushi Swap project.
Back then, the Sushi Swap community was much much smaller than it is today – and one of the biggest contributors at the time?
Sam Bankman-Fried.
Off the back of this sleuthing, Cochran has said:
“I am 99% sure that it is either someone from Alameda, FTX, or SBF himself, apparently some former FTX folks think it’s Sam as well.”
Plus! This mystery wallet also appears to have received deposits from FTX and Alameda over more than two years, and currently holds a balance of 12,331 ETH (~$22 million).
Now. It should be said: this is is all just speculation, and many are pointing the finger away from Sam.
But either way, one thing is for certain:
The Netflix documentary covering the FTX implosion/fall out is going to be an absolute doozy.