The mysterious creator of the BALD token looks more like a regular DeFi degen than the former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried.

While blockchain users can hide behind anonymity, the immutable nature of these decentralized networks means that their on-chain activity can be viewed and traced by those looking for answers. Sometimes, a seemingly inconsequential transaction sent years ago could prove costly for those looking to stay in the dark.  

In a tweet on Thursday, on-chain sleuth ZachXBT highlighted a transaction sent from the BALD deployer’s wallet address in 2021 to crypto investor Mike McDonald.

BALD deployer is potentially revealed here.

Two days ago I noticed they had sent Mike $50K back in 2021 and reached out to him to ask who it might be.

0x0b6e7d5668c4a0a8e13d618b1ffc4406d079141e022381aad379040518dec285

Glad to see he shared this info. https://t.co/A7EchAdKed pic.twitter.com/J31DJ9wEhS

— ZachXBT (@zachxbt) August 3, 2023

McDonald claims to have been paid $50,000 from the wallet in question after a winning a bet with Twitter user “@milkyway16eth.” Incidentally, the account tweeted about BALD several times, and in one of these tweets, even stated that the contract was “legit” and didn’t facilitate upgradability.

account went private now pic.twitter.com/ipN8BDpgM9

— ZachXBT (@zachxbt) August 3, 2023

Earlier this week, the BALD deployer removed millions of dollars’ worth of liquidity just days after launching the meme coin on Coinbase’s Layer 2 network Base. The token lost 90% of its value after hitting a peak market capitalization of $85 million.

Initially, market participants raised suspicions that the token’s deployer was a Coinbase insider, given the significant amount of cbETH supply the wallet held. Wintermute researcher Igor Igamberdiev dismissed these claims, noting that the cbETH was not minted on Coinbase but actually purchased on Uniswap V3.

Igamberdiev, however, shifted suspicions to the deployer being associated with a former Alameda Research executive. In his view, the wallet activity that coincided with certain social media announcements from former Alameda CEO Sam Trabucco suggested that he was more likely to be the wallet’s owner than Sam Bankman-Fried.

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There are a few more details, such as the dates of some addresses’ activities correlate with Trabucco tweets

For example, a tweet about the Stargate auctionhttps://t.co/yvwEWRKfdN pic.twitter.com/fh86jpcehn

— Igor Igamberdiev (@FrankResearcher) August 1, 2023

Still, some other researchers alleged that the official tweets about the incident from the BALD deployer’s official Twitter account, coupled with the lack of any wallet activity around the time of Bankman-Fried’s arrest made a case for why he was behind the scam.

ZachXBT’s revelations might have put some conspiracy theories to bed, but some users still speculated that the Twitter account associated with the BALD deployer (which has since been made private) could be an alternative one used by a well-known player.