Bald Hack

TOTAL LOST $23.1M
High Drained Liquidity Pool / Rugpull base

Summarize with AI

ChatGPT Perplexity Claude Grok
Affected Chain base Incident surface
Recovered - No recovery reported
All-Time Rank #209 By amount stolen
Protocol Type Exit Scam/Rugpull Target category

Incident Overview

Quick Summary

Bald token project rugpulled, removing liquidity worth 22,458,422 $USD.

Details of the Exploit

Bald is an ERC20 token running on Coinbase's Base chain and trading on LeetSwap. The token faced an exit scam by its deployer who removed liquidity from the LP pool in multiple transactions. Specifically, the last four removals included 10,804 $ETH, worth roughly 19,930,848 $USD at current rates.

As of July 31, 2023, the stolen funds remain at the scammer's initial address, and the scammer now controls 12,059 $ETH, equating to 22,458,422 $USD. The official tweet of the project claims that no tokens were sold, and only liquidity was added and removed.

Block Data Reference

Deployer Address:

https://basescan.org/address/0xccfa0530…176389

Liquidity Removal Transactions:

https://basescan.org/tx/0xd4fce790…e52ade

https://basescan.org/tx/0xb594b77f…4463e8

https://basescan.org/tx/0xf885a586…fc5239

https://basescan.org/tx/0xbfb94d96…bac3ee

Tweet:

https://archive.ph/4eV8F

Incident Report

Protocol / Project Bald
Date of Incident
Affected Chain(s) base
Attack Technique Drained Liquidity Pool / Rugpull
Classification Rugpull / Token
Primary Source View Post-Mortem

Protocol Information

Protocol Type Exit Scam/Rugpull
Affected Token Bald
Protocol Twitter/X @BaldBaseBald
Team Anonymous
Source Code Verified On-Chain

Market Context at Time of Hack

Token Categories
Memes Base Ecosystem
Protocol Links

What the Attacker Needed to Succeed

Understanding the prerequisites for this type of attack helps auditors identify protocols that are most at risk and helps developers build better defenses.

Technical Knowledge Deep understanding of drained liquidity pool / rugpull and Solidity and EVM internals
Capital Required Seed capital to cover gas and initial position setup
On-Chain Access Ability to interact with base smart contracts and deploy a custom exploit contract
Protocol Analysis Identification of the exploitable vulnerability in Bald's contract logic - root cause: rugpull / token
Execution Speed Precise transaction ordering and timing to exploit the vulnerability within a single atomic block
Obfuscation Plan A strategy to launder and move stolen funds - typically through mixers, cross-chain bridges, or decentralized DEX swaps to resist tracing

What Auditors Should Check

Could this have been caught in audit? Hard to catch — private key / OpSec failures are outside smart contract audit scope

If you're auditing a protocol with similar architecture to Bald, these are the critical security checks that could have prevented this incident (August 2023).

  • Verify all logic paths related to Drained Liquidity Pool / Rugpull are guarded by proper access controls and input validation
  • Review privileged functions (owner, admin, governance) for potential abuse vectors - centralization risks should be documented and bounded with timelocks or multi-sigs

Master these auditing techniques with hands-on labs and real exploit scenarios in the Smart Contract Hacking course.

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Post-Incident Timeline

  • 2023-07-31

    The deployer removed liquidity for additional 374 ETH, and the total stolen amount reached 23,129,572 USD Liquidity Removal Transaction: https://basescan.org/tx/0x3684fb97025db177676e0d9d8598fb97e8578224c29b2917dd24dab3818bb94e

Sources & References

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