• The memecoin $BALD acquired $68 million from investors in a day, but suddenly the deployer removed all liquidity for $BALD. This caused its market price to tank by 91%.
• On-chain sleuths detected a link between the deployer’s wallet & Alameda and identified Samuel Bankman-Fried (SBF) as the prime suspect.
• Blockchain security & analytics company Nansen issued an alert about multiple liquidity pools being compromised on LeetSwap.
$25M Liquidity Crunch On Base L2 by Tadas Klimasevskis
The short-lived memecoin frenzy on Coinbase’s Layer-2 Base blockchain has been marked with its first massive rugpull. Memecoin $BALD suddenly plunged 91% within 24 hours after the deployer of Brian Armstrong-themed Bald (BALD) removed all liquidity for it, which consisted of around 30% of all liquidity on the Base blockchain. It went from a daily high of $0.093869 to trading at just $0.00617964 according to CoinGecko.
On-Chain Sleuths Declare Prime Suspect
On-chain sleuths declared Samuel Bankman-Fried (SBF), founder of FTX, as the prime suspect as there was interaction between the deployer’s wallet and one of crypto wallets linked to Alameda Research, sister firm of now defunct crypto exchange FTX . Blockchain security audit company CertiK issued a slippage alert when price plunge reached 88%, while also warning about multiple liquidity pools compromised on LeetSwap.
Rugpull Profits Over $5 Million
Surprisingly or not, the rugpull initiator managed to get away with over $5 million in profit in less than two days without selling any tokens and simply adding and removing two sided liquidity while buying BALD simultaneously. This drastic move saw investors lose out on a whopping amount of money worth around 68 million dollars!
CertiK Alert Issued
CertiK issued an alert regarding this event via their official Twitter account with details about how much WETH was removed from the LeetSwap pair (~$20.3M). They also reported that there had been an 88% drop caused by sells following removal of 11,139 WETH from liquidity pool on LeetSwap pair.
Conclusion
This marks yet another instance where DeFi projects have failed due to lack of proper security measures or malicious intent by some players inside or outside the system which leads to huge loses for innocent users who have invested into such projects hoping for returns only be disappointed in end!