A new memecoin on Coinbase’s Base network fell 85% after its developer allegedly pulled liquidity of 1,034 Ether (ETH), worth approximately $1.9 million, from the market, according to social media reports. The developer for BALD denied making any market sales of the coin, stating that they “only added/removed 2 sided liquidity and bought.”
Watching the $BALD chart pic.twitter.com/2lc0HEVlNu
— Whale (@WhaleChart) July 31, 2023
Blockchain data shows that the deployer removed liquidity of 374 ETH (approximately $696,598).
Coinbase’s Base network was launched for builders on July 13. However, its development team has urged ordinary users not to use the network, as it lacks a functioning user interface (UI) for its bridge. The team plans to officially release the network to users in August, at which point a bridge UI will be made available.
Despite these warnings, some investors have sought early returns by buying up assets on the network before it is officially launched. They’ve done so by using development tools to bridge ETH from Ethereum to Base without a UI.
On July 29, a pseudonymous developer with the Twitter handle “Bald” announced the launch of the BALD token on Base network at address 0x27D2DECb4bFC9C76F0309b8E88dec3a601Fe25a8.
The token gained 289,000% within the first 14 hours of trading. But on July 31, Twitter users began reporting that the token’s deployer account had removed 1,034 ETH in liquidity, causing its price to fall to nearly zero.
$BALD deployer just removed 1034 ETH from Liquidity
Others removed 6,800 eth and 1800 ETH from liq as well https://t.co/A2357QUF0H pic.twitter.com/4lH8LHxv2v
— notEezzy (@notEezzy) July 31, 2023
In a social media post, the BALD developer denied selling tokens through a market order, stating, “I didn’t sell a single token at any point since deployment. Just added/removed 2 sided liquidity and bought.” In response, one coin collector argued that adding two-sided liquidity is, in fact, selling tokens, to which the BALD developer replied, “correct.”
Related: Crypto degens launch 50 alien-themed meme coins
Blockchain data reveals that the BALD token was deployed by account 0xccfa0530b9d52f970d1a2daea670ce58e4176389. Beginning at 1:59 p.m. UTC on July 31, a third account at address 0xafba765e49a4545569e955f6c4baba12e427bf64 began making “renounce ownership” and “remove liquidity” function calls to this deployer account. A total of six “renounce ownership” and 30 “remove liquidity” calls were made. These transactions had zero value and contained no logs, making it difficult to determine whether any tokens or ETH were transferred to this account through these transactions.
One “remove liquidity” transaction was made by the deployer account at 2:53 p.m. UTC, removing 374.4649549721529 Wrapped Ether (WETH) tokens (worth approximately $696,598) and 50,050,877 BALD tokens.
Investors have lost significant sums from failed memecoin launches recently. On July 26, over $2 million was lost following the launch of Pond0x, which allegedly contained a faulty transfer function that allowed any user to transfer another user’s tokens without their consent.