Is Sam Bankman-Fried secretly behind BALD? 

There’s been quite a buzz on Crypto Twitter lately as a new conspiracy theory is making the rounds. It’s claiming that Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of FTX, might be the secret force behind one of the hottest and most controversial memecoins on Base called BALD.

This memecoin, named in a playful nod to Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, made its debut on July 30 and astonished everyone with an astounding 289,000% surge in just 24 hours of trading. The speculation surrounding its mysterious origins has certainly stirred up the crypto community.

Following the removal of a substantial amount of ETH liquidity by the anonymous developer, the price of BALD experienced a drastic drop of over 85%. This sudden decline triggered accusations of a “rug pull,” a term used to describe a developer’s action of draining liquidity from a token, but the developer refuted these claims.

In the wake of this incident, several blockchain investigators delved into the developer’s past on-chain activities, leading some to speculate about a possible connection to SBF. This speculation was fueled by the observation that the Ethereum wallet address responsible for deploying the Bald token had received significant funding from wallets associated with FTX and Alameda Research, which SBF is affiliated with.

One of the proponents of this conspiracy theory is a decentralized finance (DeFi) commentator known as Downsin, who suggested that the link between SBF and the wallet address could imply that SBF was trying to recover losses while potentially facing legal trouble, humorously saying, “legit trying to make it all back from prison.”

However, it’s essential to clarify that SBF is not currently in prison but rather under house arrest at his parent’s residence in California, awaiting his October trial.

Adding further fuel to the rumor was Blockworks data editor Andrew Thurman, who found that the same wallet address had made approximately 400 transfers to blacklisted USDT addresses and had “serious Alameda connections for sure.”

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