A standard week in the life of a cryptocurrency investor
and why everyone's prematurely balding
It's honestly insane there's nobody documenting the constant sitcom that is crypto twitter. This stuff would read like a cowboy fantasy to my parents. Like, last week:
Coinbase released it's own chain called BASE. Brave early-adopters bridged funds over to try it out and explore, because you can usually make a decent stack being early to a chain. The first big memecoin on BASE was called $BALD, in what supporters called "total norwood victory."
It went up like 100x in a day, but the only bridge back to the Ethereum mainnet broke - stranding everyone with millions of dollars they couldn't actually use or get into their bank accounts. Everyone freaked out, obviously, but the bridge got fixed and everything went back to business as usual...
Until the only exchange you could buy or sell the token on (called "LeetSwap", lmao) broke, so people couldn't sell. Nobody realized for a while and we just got a burst of pure adrenaline. "OH MY GOD, LOOK AT THE $BALD PRICE!? IT'S GOING STRAIGHT UP!!"
Eventually people realized it was going straight up because nobody could sell. The euphoria melted into horror. Commence freakout Pt. 2 as everyone realized they were stranded again. "It's over!! We got scammed again! It's a honeypot!"
The LeetSwap boys apparently thrive on pressure though, so they got things back up and running real quick. Disaster 2 averted. The town was saved, though all the citizens were starting to accumulate brain damage from the emotional whiplash at this point.
Next, people notice someone buying the token in 50k clips, just accumulating a massive amount even thought the price was near it's all-time-high. Some people research the wallet making the buys and convince themselves he's a Coinbase insider. Rumors circulate that $BALD is a Coinbase marketing project, or potentially it's not just a memecoin but an actual official coinbase project that hasn't been announced yet. The price starts taking off again - up until the liquidity gets pulled*. It turns out they never locked liquidity! Rugged a third time.
People start looking into the guy who made $BALD and realized he's been associated with a bunch of other scams in the past. Maybe you're wondering "why would people invest millions of dollars in a coin released by a known scammer on an untested chain with no infrastructure?" and that's a valid question. The answer is the people doing this either have balls so much bigger than yours or so much more mental illness than you, they're essentially a different species. You should think of them almost like characters in a Greek myth.
In light of the final scam, snarky commentators started asking why nobody thought to check on the history of the guy who made the coin *before* investing, but honestly, it wouldn't have even changed things. If the average onchain investor saw the coin's creator had tens of millions in his wallet from previous scams they'd go "NICE! I bet he can market the shit out of this. Gonna cop a bag asap" because the things that make someone a good scammer have almost 100% overlap with the things that guarantee your ability to make people a lot of money.
This is about where I checked out before I went on vacation. It seems like the scammer's name was "milk" or something, and he's apparently tied to some bigger names in the sphere. We probably get a fun little witch-hunt where VCs pore over all the transactions he's ever made to see if he ever interacted with people they don't like in a way that'd let them paint their competition in a negative light, but I'd be surprised if there was any legal action. Maybe there will be - this all happened on Coinbase's chain, and if they get enough bad press or feel embarrassed enough maybe they'll do something.
Who knows.
We'll forget all about it in a week when we get the next Crypto Twitter drama airdrop.