EOS arbitrage past, the first-tier and second-tier spread business in the 350-day ICO, nostalgic for the low-hanging fruits of the year

Author: Huang Shiliang, Lightning HSL

EOS changed its name, and it turned out to be called A, the A of abcd, and the first place in the alphabet in the exchange is EOS.

I've always had a crush on EOS because for the first three months of the 350-day ultra-long-term ICO fundraising process, I was involved in the primary market in EOS's ICO and the secondary market arbitrage in the exchange, making a small amount of money.

That was the easiest money I've ever made.

EOS started its ICO on June 26, 2017 and ended on June 1, 2018, raising more than $4 billion in ETH and issuing 900 million EOS tokens.

The ICO mechanism of EOS was still quite new at the time.

EOS was initially ICO through a smart contract deployed on Ethereum, with tokens issued in two phases: the first phase was a one-time distribution of 200 million EOS five days before the ICO started (June 26-30, 2017);

After that, it enters the second stage, which is the daily round issuance mechanism. Every day (every 23 hours), the EOS smart contract accepts users' ETH stakes, and distributes 2 million EOS for the day according to the proportion of ETH of all participants at the end of the round.

This daily issuance phase lasted for a total of 350 days, with a total of 700 million EOS issued. Together with the 200 million in the first five days, a total of 900 million EOS will be issued, and another 100 million EOS will be reserved for the project party Block.one, forming a total issuance of 1 billion.

EOS's ICO sold 900 million EOS-erc20 tokens and received $4.2 billion, totaling 7.2 million ETH coins.

At that time, not many people in the industry studied how to operate the Ethereum contract, how to deposit into the contract, and how to claim the purchased tokens.

At that time, the tools were rudimentary, unlike today's contracts and wallets, and the UI interface was very good.

In 2017, the main wallet of Ethereum was MyEtherWallet, I have a good impression of this wallet, the private key file used is still a json file, and the contract used to operate the EOS ICO needs to configure various parameters by itself, which is better than the command line (DoS) operation.

The current metamask wallet, imtoken, etc., with various contracts, are very perfect to visualize the UI of various operation commands, and users only need to click the button to complete all contract interaction actions.

At that time, MyEtherWallet invested in EOS ICO, and every time it had to import the private key json file, select the contract, select the contract parameters and commands, and fill in the amount of ETH you want to inject into the contract, including the amount of gas, which is user-defined.

Then it's time to claim (claim eos-erc20), and it's time to fill in a few parameters.

At that time, very few people did these operations.

I was initially curious, and I was very curious about EOS because I had played around 2015 with various bitshares. So I took a hard look at EOS's ICO on ETH.

EOS is also directly traded on exchanges during the 350-day ultra-long-term ICO. That is, during the EOS ICO, the primary market and the secondary market are opened at the same time. However, prices in the primary and secondary markets are not synchronized.

This creates a potential arbitrage space.

At that time, I deposited ETH into the ETH ICO contract every day, claimed eos-erc20 when the time came, and then directly deposited it to the exchange and sold it.

It's such a simple arbitrage, there is no hedging at all, there is no J8 strategy, just simply bet that the price of the primary market is cheaper than the secondary market, and you can always make money.

This kind of money lasted very long, and I barely lost money once in the first three months, but then I started losing money in the next few months, and then after half a year I stopped doing it.

Why did I dare to judge that EOS would be cheaper in the primary market at first? This is because there are not many people who can buy coins in ICO contracts.

In the beginning, when I looked at the interaction addresses on the chain, it was less than 100 per day, and in the first three months, most of the time, it was 148 addresses, which I can remember. Then the addresses began to increase, and then the profit was gone.

In this first-level and second-level gambling spread arbitrage game, I also observed the behavior of hackers on the chain attacking the chain, in order to make money.

Because there is a mechanism to end the period every 23 hours, in the last few minutes after the end of the period, it is often possible to calculate the price in the primary market, because how much ETH in the contract is transparent, and then compare the price in the secondary market to know if there is arbitrage space.

Therefore, a large amount of ETH will be deposited in the last few minutes, which may cause the first-level price to be more expensive.

Then, in the last few minutes, hackers construct a terrifying transaction that consumes ETH gas, blocking the entire ETH chain and making it impossible for others to charge ETH into the eos ico contract.

After I went through a failed top-up, I learned to be obedient, and every time I grabbed a share of the first level at the last time, I directly filled up the gas, what a waste of money. After losing a few gas losses, I stopped the game and let them compete, and I did my best.

That arbitrage war for half a year did make a small amount of money, but blessings and misfortunes depended on each other, and many things were found to have left disasters in the next few years.

Because EOS's ICO has a 23-hour period, the time of the claim changes in a 1-hour gradient every day, so the time to grab the first level and claim tokens changes constantly every day, so 1/3 of the time of the period occurs when I should sleep.

But in order to make money, how can I sleep or sleep, what is 12 o'clock at night, 3 o'clock in the morning, all get up and do it.

This thing, it's really okay to stay up late once or twice, it can last for a week, and it's troublesome. And it's not a simple matter of staying up late, because there is a huge amount of money profit, and every time you do it, you are either very excited or angry......

Of course, it's not just the body that is getting worse, but I think there will be worse effects later.

I was working on a project with a small team. But when my brothers see my virtue every day, the boss is not motivated, and it is even more impossible for others to work hard.

Looking back, there was still a chance to do this project at that time, but I did it blindly J8 and hurt my brothers. Later in 2018, several brothers took the initiative to leave.

Come to think of it, I'm actually quite fragile, and I don't have the courage to lead the team anymore.

Just this year, Musk entered politics with a high profile, and I thought that his company, including Tesla, X.com, and SpaceX, may suffer, which is a loss for the whole world. If the boss doesn't drive in person, the company will probably not do well.

There was another by-product of this experience.

It was 2017, at the height of the BTC scaling controversy, and I was a hardcore scaler at the time, but I liked to write articles expressing my support for scaling.

Maybe it's because EOS arbitrage made money, I became inflated at the time, and because I didn't sleep well every day, I wrote articles and expressed my opinions in the group, which may be too arrogant and offended a lot.

Later, he was cyberbullied. The experience of being cyberbullied made me very unbrave on the Internet.

Until now, I feel that I am quite cowardly on the Internet, and I dare not curse anymore.

There were two experiences at that time, which I remember very well.

One time was when the team from RSK (Bitcoin's sidechain project) was coming to China to give a talk about the roadshow, because I had written a lot of articles about sidechains in the early years, and their team asked me to speak with them. I was very unceremoniously criticized on the phone for not being firm in scaling. Hey, I'm so big, I'm so stupid.

The night before the phone call, at 3 a.m., I was still working on the EOS ICO, and I was so excited that I didn't sleep, and I didn't have the strength to talk well when I answered the phone.

Another time a reporter from a newspaper called me and asked me about scaling, and I said with a bang, "Do you dare to do what I say, because I said a lot of things that are not good for the supporters of the small block." Hey, actually, I'm only talking about technology, maybe it's better.

It was too inflated at the time, but I've always been a very humble person.

Time flies, 8 years have passed since the EOS ICO, and the money earned has been lost, leaving only some memories.