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BALD's sharp decline, what is the future of Base public chain?

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What could be the reason behind BALD's sudden surge and rapid decline, and what is the Base chain all about?

Original title: "Online and then cold? BALD plummets by a thousand times, what is the future of Base public chain?"

Original source: veDAO

Recently, the L2 network Base launched by Coinbase based on OP Stack has caused a stir in the cryptocurrency community. The reason is that the Meme coin BALD issued on Base has skyrocketed by thousands of times in a day, attracting tens of millions of dollars of hot money to the Base chain, and its market value has broken through 100 million US dollars in just 2 days. The liquidity scale of the fund pool has also exceeded 25 million US dollars.

However, when the encryption community was immersed in the contemplation of whether "BALD will create a new round of wealth myth", the price of BALD token began to plummet due to Bald's withdrawal of a total of 8660 ETH and 179 million BALD liquidity, causing a significant drop in the price of BALD, with a maximum decline of up to 80%, and TVL also dropped to below $9 million at one point.

What could be the reason behind the sudden surge and rapid decline of BALD? What about Base Chain, what is its future direction? In this article, veDAO Research Institute will provide an interpretation of Base Chain and BALD.

BALD Controversy

BALD is a token project launched on the Base chain, inspired by the bald head of Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong. It has created an image called BALD Jesus and a philosophy called BALDism. The project claims to be the first meme coin on Base and pays tribute to Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong by using the name "bald".

The BALD project has attracted a lot of attention and investment from users. However, the project experienced dramatic ups and downs within two days.

The fluctuation of BALD token price is closely related to the outflow of large funds. As the Base mainnet has not been officially released to the public, the BALD tokens based on the Base network can currently only flow in and not out.

However, there is one exception, which is the deployment party of BALD, "BaldBaseBald", who still has the authority to freely trade tokens.

Therefore, a strange situation occurred: as the price of BALD token soared, more and more retail investors entered the market, pushing the BALD token to its historical high. However, after that, BaldBaseBald withdrew over 10,500 ETH from the BALD fund pool, worth nearly $25 million, almost breaking the bottom of the pool. This caused the token price to plummet by 85% in just a few minutes, with the token trading price dropping to $0.0000000018, with almost no trading volume or activity. This move has sparked anger and disappointment among many cryptocurrency investors and supporters.

After experiencing a surge and subsequent drop, BALD developers denied any wrongdoing and responded on Twitter, stating that they only added and removed bilateral liquidity and purchased tokens.

However, Bald's strange actions have sparked a lot of speculation in the encryption community about its behind-the-scenes manipulators. According to on-chain data research, the deploying address has received thousands of ETH from wallets related to FTX and Alameda Research.

There are similarities in sentence structure between Bald's official tweets and SBF's tweets, for example, "Correct" and "quite well" appear in Bald's few tweets, which are precisely the vocabulary commonly used by SBF.

However, after all, SBF is currently in a strict internet monitoring environment, and such statements are just one of many speculations. Currently, there is no conclusive evidence on who is behind Bald. Whether Bald is a scam or not is still inconclusive. Perhaps it will only be possible to draw a conclusion after the Base mainnet is officially launched and ordinary users can extract tokens normally. However, it is undeniable that the short-lived myth of Bald's sudden wealth has indeed brought a breath of fresh air to the crypto community, and although it plummeted overnight, it has become a traffic and fund attracting tool for the Base ecosystem. As a Coinbase-promoted L2 public chain with deep ties to OP, it naturally has traffic and funding, and its development potential is still worth paying attention to.

What is a Base Chain?

Base, incubated by Coinbase, is the second L2 network deployed on the OP Stack, following the Optimism mainnet, and intends to become a part of the Optimism superchain.

The launch of the Base chain is within Coinbase's long-term plan. Its goal is to extend Ethereum through a powerful and interoperable Web3 ecosystem, so that anyone, anywhere can build decentralized applications or on-chain Dapps based on Base in a secure, low-cost, and developer-friendly way. At the same time, Base is also the on-chain home for Coinbase's existing products, users, and assets. Dapps on Base can seamlessly integrate with Coinbase, fiat gateways, and Coinbase's ecosystem.

OP Stack and Optimism Super Chain

OP Stack is a standardized, shared, and open-source development stack that supports Optimism, currently maintained by the Optimism Collective. OP Stack is a set of software that supports Optimism's standardized, shared, and open-source development stack, maintained by the Optimism Collective. Currently appearing as software behind the Optimism mainnet, it will ultimately appear as the Optimism superchain and its governance. OP Stack primarily focuses on creating a shared, high-quality, fully open-source system for creating new L2 networks. By coordinating shared standards, the Optimism Collective can avoid duplicative construction in isolation.

Optimism Superchain seeks to integrate previously isolated L2 networks into an interoperable and composable system. For example, Coinbase Base will work with Optimism Collective to design and build a protocol that can rank multiple L2s and provide interoperability and composability between them through the OP Stack. The short-term goal of the Optimism Superchain is to upgrade Optimism mainnet, Base, and other L2s to an initial superchain structure with shared bridges and ranking. The long-term goal is to develop into a large network that maximizes interoperability, shares decentralized protocols, and standardizes its core primitives.

The reason why the Base chain ecosystem can explode, in addition to the influence of BALD, is also supported by the popularity of Coinbase + Optimism. Although the Base chain currently only has a one-way cross-chain bridge without a front-end (Ethereum → Base), it is in the very early stage. As a crypto giant with a market value of 20 billion US dollars, Coinbase can be said to have unparalleled global influence in this field. Apart from BALD, let's take a look at which potential ecological projects are on Base.

Pike Protocol

Pike is a universal liquidity protocol designed to unlock the utility of native assets by aggregating liquidity on blockchain networks.

MES Protocol

MES Protocol is a highly scalable and high-performance order book DEX that supports multiple aggregated trades within a single order book. The protocol is supported by zk Rollup and is currently running on the order book-based exchanges zkSync and StarkNet. The protocol aims to create a cross-Rollup interoperable exchange solution to achieve liquidity between Rollups, an integrated order book for token exchange, and seamless asset transfers across networks.

Volmex Finance

Backed Finance

Backed is an RWA (real-world assets) platform aimed at expanding the channels for obtaining financial assets by decentralizing finance through the inclusion of stocks. The platform currently manages $12 million in assets, and users can purchase real-world assets on the chain and put their stablecoins to use. Backed's first product is called bCSPX, which is an ERC-20 tokenized tracker for the iShares Core S&P UCITS ETF.

Perennial

Perennial is a DeFi derivative protocol used for trading price information exposure. It is equivalent to a point-to-point pool AMM, which can provide leverage exposure for traders and earn fees for LP. The protocol's mechanism design combines the advantages of DeFi and CeFi, making trading on Perennial both simple and scalable. It uses DeFi's native trading patterns, such as no order book, zero price slippage, permissionless leverage, and composable positions.

Summary

Of course, Base is still in its early stages, and whether these projects can succeed remains to be seen. However, the fact that there are regular projects on Base suggests that it is not just a meme coin blockchain. There are still many promising projects on Base that could make it a viable alternative to Ethereum. The success of Base will depend on whether it can attract users who are looking for a more affordable and efficient way to use Ethereum. If Base can provide a convincing value proposition, it may become a major player in the Ethereum ecosystem.