Research Director at Wintermute, Igor Igamberdiev, discovered via blockchain data that the creator of the Bald memecoin has ties to Alameda Research.
Igor Igamberdiev research revolves around a pre-existing wallet with ties to Alameda that made deposits to the same FTX address as the Bald deployer.
On-chain experts are looking at the circumstances leading up to the apparent “rug pull” of Bald memecoin, which caused its market value to fall.
Last week, the Bald token shot to prominence in the cryptocurrency industry, reaching a high market worth of $85 million. This sudden drain of liquidity by key developers or holders led to a precipitous drop in the token’s price, close to nothing, and had all the hallmarks of a rug pull. The token’s creator admitted on Twitter that they had shut off trading.
Wintermute’s head of research, Igor Igamberdiev, pointed up an observation linking the Bald deployer (the Base network smart contract address used to produce the Bald memecoin) to Alameda Research, the defunct research and trading branch of the FTX Exchange.
Igamberdiev found a relationship between the deployer and an earlier wallet (0x000f7f), which was a major discovery. The Bald deployer address and 0x000f7f are connected since they used the same deposit account at FTX Exchange. Moreover, Alameda has personal experience with the latter wallet address dating all the way back to June of that year.
During 2019 and 2020, Igamberdiev discovered heavy activity from the 0x000f7f wallet across many exchanges and protocols, including Oasis, 0x v2.1, dYdX v2, and Set Protocol. These dealings suggest that the wallet’s owner had both substantial financial resources and technological sophistication.
Despite the lack of definitive evidence, on-chain traces do indicate a close relationship between the creator of the Bald token and Alameda.
