Who is behind BALD: the head of Coinbase, the CEO of FTX, or a simple degen
Date: 2023-08-06 Author: Karina Ziganova Categories: BUSINESS
On-chain analyst ZachXBT has identified the account behind the scandalous BALD memcoin. It was issued by $50,000 sent to crypto investor Mike McDonald almost two years ago
In the cryptocurrency environment, there are no names, only wallet addresses. However, this anonymity is very deceptive. The blockchain is transparent and remembers everything, so if you wish, you can unearth a lot of interesting things in it.
ZachXBT investigation
ZachXBT, a Twitter character who calls himself an on-chain sleuth and 2D detective, discovered a link between developer BALD and user 'milkyway16eth' through a two-year-old transaction sent to a certain Mike McDonald.
The diagram shows that 17 transactions were sent from the BALD address to the milkyway16eth address for a total of $25.7 million. At the same time, the milkyway16eth address is connected to Mike's address with one old transfer.
ZachXBT contacted Mike and found out that he won the $50,000 he received from the specified wallet in a bet with "@milkyway16eth".
Who is Milkyway
The user under this nickname considers himself to be among the traders and farmers of profitability. However, now his Twitter account has been moved to the category of closed ones.
Meanwhile, he wrote about BALD several times, and in one of the tweets he even stated that the contract is quite “reliable”, since there are no “red flags” in it, such as the possibility of renewal or minting.
BALD conspiracy theories
On the past, the BALD memcoin appeared in the second-level Base network. During the day, the market capitalization of the coin grew tens of thousands of times and reached $85 million. However, having reached a peak value of around $0.085, the price collapsed almost to zero.
At first, market participants decided that someone from Coinbase was involved in the creation of BALD, because someone was actively pouring cbETH into the project pool. However, Wintermute expert Igor Igamberdiev denied these assumptions, noting that cbETH was not mined on Coinbase, but purchased on Uniswap V3.
He translated the suspicions of a former Alameda Research executive. In his opinion, the activity of the wallet, which coincides with some social media posts by former Alameda CEO Sam Trabucco, points to his involvement with BALD.
ZachXBT's investigations could put an end to some conspiracy theories, but some users still believe that the account associated with the BALD contract may be an alternative account of some famous person.
