TL;DR
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Some people believe that Sam Bankman-Fried was behind the recent $BALD token scam.
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The $BALD meme coin was launched on Monday and quickly skyrocketed in price. Once it was done, the developer behind the project drained 90% of the liquidity pool.
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Cinneamhain Ventures partner Adam Cochran said, “I’m 99% sure it’s someone from Alameda, FTX or SBF itself.”
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While others point the finger away from Sam.
Full story
Sam Bankman-Fried is currently under house arrest and has limited internet access.
…but some believe he has secretly returned to the crypto space, once again robbing people of their money.
Here’s how a bunch of internet sleuths came to that conclusion:
ICYMI on Monday, a new meme coin ($BALD) hit the market and skyrocketed in price.
Once it was done, the developer behind the project drained 90% of the liquidity pool.
What exactly does that mean?
Let’s start here…
If you’ve ever sold one crypto token into another, you’ve used a liquidity pool.
See, when you trade something like $BALD token for another token like (e.g. $ETH), you are not really trading with another person.
It would be nearly impossible to find a buyer for the exact amount of $BALD you want to sell in a short amount of time – so instead you trade with an automated liquidity pool.
It goes like this:
Suppose someone takes $1000 worth of Ethereum (ETH) and uses it to buy $BALD.
That $1000 in ETH is added to the $BALD liquidity pool and the buyer gets $1K in $BALD tokens in return.
When/if someone sells their $BALD tokens, they are essentially selling them back to the liquidity pool, in exchange for a portion of the pool’s supply 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 lot of people to buy into → which grows the liquidity pool → the developer then uses their admin access to transfer all the crypto from the liquidity pool to their own wallet.
As a result, anyone holding the coin cannot exchange it for anything else (because the supply of cash intended to support these transactions is gone).
This is where SBF comes into play:
Cinnamhain Ventures partner Adam Cochran did some digging and discovered that the $BALD developer’s wallet address is a wallet involved in the early days of the Sushi Swap project.
Back then, the Sushi Swap community was much smaller than it is now – and one of the biggest contributors at the time?
Sam Bankman Fried.
On the back of this sleuthing, Cochran has said:
“I’m 99% sure it’s either someone from Alameda, FTX or SBF itself, apparently some former FTX people also think it’s Sam.”
Plus! This mysterious wallet also appears to have been receiving deposits from FTX and Alameda for over two years and currently has a balance of 12,331 ETH (~$22 million).
Now. It must be said: this is all just speculation, and many are pointing the finger away from Sam.
But anyway, one thing is certain:
The Netflix documentary on the FTX implosion/outage is going to be an absolute doozy.