Base's BALD Memecoin Rug Pull Drains $23 Million in a Single Day

Coinbase's layer-2 network, Base — still officially a testnet — suffered its first major rug pull less than a day after a new memecoin called BALD took off on the chain, with the rug pulled for roughly $23 million.

Within about 24 hours of launch, traders piled into BALD, a token whose branding leaned on Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong's shaved head, framed half-jokingly as a rallying symbol for Base users in the ongoing standoff with the SEC. The token's deployer had dubious origins from the start, but that did nothing to slow speculators eager to throw money in ahead of the near-inevitable comedown.

Because Base still had no official, user-friendly bridge at the time, many users sent ETH straight to a contract address with little apparent caution. A slow, official withdrawal tool existed, along with unofficial routes, but a large share of traders chose instead to keep trading against each other, driving an aggressive price run. With several other Base tokens having already rugged in the days prior, BALD stood out as one of the few games still running, pulling in even more speculative capital while the broader DeFi market struggled.

Analysis credited to PeckShield and pseudonymous researcher thiccy showed the deployer repeatedly topping up the pool, adding roughly $12 million in liquidity within the first 24 hours and helping push BALD's price sharply higher. The scale of that spending led some observers to speculate Armstrong himself might be behind the wallet, seeking to generate buzz for the new chain.

After the initial burst of momentum faded and price stagnated, the deployer began buying the BASE token instead, driving a further pump of nearly 100% to around $0.10 — accompanied by a reassuring social media post telling holders to stay the course ("steady lads").

Then came the rug. Shortly after midday UTC that Monday, the deployer withdrew essentially all of the pool's liquidity — about $23 million in total (transaction record) — netting a profit of 3,163 ETH, worth roughly $5.9 million at the time.

Afterward, the deployer pushed back against accusations on Twitter: "I didn't sell a single token at any point since deployment. Just added/removed 2 sided liquidity and bought." When challenged further by other users, the deployer largely abandoned any pretense of innocence.

The wallet behind the deployment has been identified on-chain as 0xccfa0530b9d52f970d1a2daea670ce58e4176389; the liquidity-removal transaction cited above is 0xd4fce790….

In the aftermath, the community dug into the deployer wallet's history and surfaced some notable connections: sizeable incoming transfers from Alameda Research, earlier participation in Sushi and dYdX governance votes, and activity that had previously pushed the cbETH lending market close to its limits. Those ties fueled speculation — including some more far-fetched theories — linking the wallet to FTX/Alameda, with a handful of commentators even floating Sam Bankman-Fried's name directly. Bankman-Fried, who had rugged FTX for roughly $10 billion and has since been called out repeatedly as a hypocrite, was under house arrest at the time with reportedly tightened restrictions on his outside communications. A closer analysis from researcher Igor Igamberdiev instead pointed toward a different individual also named Sam. Whichever party actually controlled the wallet, they continued manipulating the pool afterward to extract further profit.

The BALD episode followed closely on a rug pull on zkSync's Kannagi Finance days earlier, which had already prompted speculation about whether Base would be next — a question this incident answered. Shortly after the rug, Base's leading decentralized exchange was separately exploited for $630,000 through a price-manipulation attack tied to a publicly callable transferFeesSupportingTaxTokens() function. Together, the back-to-back incidents complicated Coinbase's effort to present Base — and itself — as an upstanding, well-governed platform, particularly with its legal battle against the SEC still ongoing.