Decrypting the Reasons Behind the Sharp Decline in BALD Price Using On-chain Data

Base is a Layer 2 network built on the Optimism's OP Stack, internally incubated by Coinbase. With the announcement of Base's mainnet launch, the amount of funds bridged to Base has experienced a significant surge.

BALD, a project on the Base network, experienced a remarkable surge of over 400 times in just two days after its launch, attracting significant attention. However, yesterday, the BALD team removed 6809 ETH liquidity, resulting in an instant 82% price drop.

Bald's official Twitter account stated that they have never sold any tokens and have only performed actions such as adding, removing liquidity, and purchasing tokens.

WikiBit conducted an analysis of the address 0xccfa0530b9d52f970d1a2daea670ce58e4176389 related to the Bald project. Since Bald's launch, the project's address has been engaged in liquidity provisioning operations from July 29th to 10:00 on July 30th, adding a total of 6480.88 ETH to the liquidity pool. Additionally, they made several purchases of Bald tokens, spending a total of 1160 ETH at 10 or 20 ETH per transaction until the Remove Liquidity ETH operation.

The actions that led to draining the pool were four instances of removing liquidity, conducted through the following transactions:

• Transaction hash: 0xb594b77f8d610fd6d333bb03c7b5cd5aa0a741c944155c442b1b7bd7114463e8

• Transaction hash: 0xd4fce790ac42a5a801bebb220adc2a6f9d9bf99985de6a824638a269c3e52ade

• Transaction hash: 0xbfb94d969b82a7a4b8d681d5c18d5b0c7960ef45f503c3a522a709575abac3ee

• Transaction hash: 0xf885a5862e8b75a8ab7c5dd66cf7c17692efd9dc784936e44d6feed4cafc5239

These transactions resulted in a total expenditure of approximately 7641 ETH, followed by retrieving approximately 10705 ETH.



After removing liquidity, the reduced pool size made it more susceptible to price fluctuations with relatively smaller amounts of Bald or ETH. The Bald team continued to purchase Bald tokens after removing liquidity, resulting in a brief price rebound. Subsequently, they added three transactions totaling 400 ETH to the liquidity pool, only to remove all liquidity approximately two hours later. This series of actions further impacted the price movement of Bald.

Data analyst Andrew T utilized on-chain analysis tool Nansen to explore the Ethereum address of the Bald deployer. Through this investigation, he discovered the Binance deposit address associated with it, as well as another active wallet that has interacted with Andrew Keys and Alameda Research. Andrew T stated, “This address is connected to several traders, but it is inevitably closely related to Alameda.”



The Chairman, with 900,000 followers, posted a tweet claiming that the mastermind behind Bald is SBF (presumably referring to Sam Bankman-Fried, the CEO of FTX).