How We Made +$50M Sniping Shitcoins On DEXs

DisclaiAugust 2020.

My brother is teaching IT at the university. I’ve just finished a 1.5-year contract as a product manager in an insurance company.

Crypto has been terrible for years and is slowly recovering from the COVID crash. We caught a few wins on Binance Launchpad, but our portfolio barely sits at $50K.

We start hearing about a new protocol called Uniswap. Friends are shitcoining there and are often catching 3-4x in a few hours. We have no idea what it is, but something feels different.

A friend tells me about sniping. He says that when bZx launched its token on Uniswap, a single bot made $500K. Unreal. My brother and I are shocked. We want to know how that’s even possible.

My brother knows absolutely nothing about Solidity. We don’t even understand how a blockchain really works.

The first snipes

Late August. We’re on holiday in Spain with family. My brother started learning Solidity a few days earlier as we want to try sniping on Uniswap.

A token is launching: $YMPL. Hype looks decent. We set up a sniping operation and ask a few friends to pool with us. We’re fishes and don’t want to carry the risk alone.

We go in with 50 ETH (~$20k at the time). $YMPL launches. We manage to snipe 8% of the listing supply. I log into Uniswap and sell within 30 minutes.

Profit? 60 ETH (~$30k). Our entire portfolio was under $50k. We’re euphoric. It feels like easy money.

We want more.

2 days later, new snipe: $VIDYA. This time, we have more funds from the profit and we feel confident after the first win. 165 ETH in. 159 ETH profit in 15 mins. Even better than last time.

4 days later, new snipe opportunity. We are in with 460 ETH. 353 ETH profit. $135k. This is our first 6-figure profit. In less than an hour. It feels fucking good.

Uniswap is blowing up. Volume climbs. Crypto degens are flooding in. It all feels too easy and we know it won’t last. We need to get better. We have to understand better how sniping actually works.

How sniping works?

To list a token on Uniswap the team must add liquidity to a pool. During previous snipes we watched for that Add-Liquidity transaction to hit the chain, and then we sent our buy which made us one block late.

Some competitors are getting in the same block as the liquidity add.

After some research, we realize that with an Ethereum node we can monitor the public mempool to see pending transactions before they hit the chain.

Starting from September, this is how sniping works for us:

• Watch the mempool for a pending Add Liquidity TX.
• Immediately send a buy TX with the same gas price.

Aim to be included in the same block right after the liquidity add.

New era of sniping on Ethereum

It’s mid-September 2020.

We’ve had ten quiet days without new launches. Perfect time to upgrade our bot. We’re now ready.

We have to face a new challenge though. Summer holidays are over. My brother is still teaching IT at the university. Sometimes, a snipe happens in the middle of his class.

Luckily, it’s COVID time and everything is remote.

When listings get close, he tells his students: “Do some research on your own for ten minutes.” That’s his way to be available to manage the snipe.

The next snipe is $CHADS. We are ready for it. We want to snipe it with 200 ETH. We know this one is gonna be a good one as the hype is insane.

I’m on voice with my brother. We’re nervous. Max pressure.

He’s the first to see the Add-Liquidity transaction appear on his terminal. When the bot detects it, he says in a serious tone:

“Ça part.” (Sorry we are French)

(meaning “It’s happening.”)

That line will stay with me forever. He says it before every snipe, with exactly the same tonality every single time, and it triggers an instant adrenaline rush.

As soon as I hear it, I start refreshing Etherscan like a maniac, waiting to see if our ETH balance drops to zero, the sign that we’re in.

We’re in. 200 ETH. The chart goes wild. My job is to sell manually on Uniswap.

With $CHADS, the numbers are overwhelming. My hands are shaking, I’m sweating, completely tunnel-visioned, just selling batch by batch to print as much as possible.

We close with 675 ETH profit (around $270K). It feels incredible. But we are exhausted from the pressure and adrenaline.

No time to rest. Three days later: $FRONTIER. Same setup, same stress. 800 ETH profit.

Two days later: $LINA. +80 ETH. Next day: $CHARTEX. +700 ETH.

2300 ETH profit in 6 days. Absolutely insane. 1 month ago, we had spent years in crypto with 100k maximum.

September 18th brings a nice surprise: Uniswap airdrop. Any address that interacted with Uniswap is eligible.

Since we’ve been running large-scale tests for a few weeks, we end up with a shit ton of eligible addresses. Each one gets around $20K. I remember my brother going through every wallet he could find and pulling mid–6 figures from it in total.

Our last snipe that month is $POLS, the token of Polkastarter which will become the GOAT of launchpads later that year.

Smart-contract and infrastructure improvements

It’s time again to improve our bot.

During our first month of sniping, we had a buy limit such as: for X ETH, we want at least Y tokens. With this system, we had to make batches of transactions, especially because in most cases we don’t know how much liquidity the team is going to add.

Example:

If a team is adding only 20 ETH of liquidity and we try to buy for 200 ETH, our limit price is not gonna be right.

My brother design a new system: for 1 ETH, we want at least Y tokens and we will buy as much as we can until reaching this limit. We were the first ones to implement such a system.

We also struggle because we never know if the team will add liquidity in ETH or USDT or USDC. My brother design a smart-contract that will buy the tokens whatever the listing pair is.

We also work on improving the speed of our bot. During $CHAD snipe, we printed hard but we were definitely not top 1 sniper after the Add Liquidity.

We deploy Ethereum nodes in multiple regions and make them compete against each other to snipe the same transaction. It quickly becomes clear that nodes hosted in North Virginia are consistently faster.

This leads us to believe that North Virginia is the best place to run our sniping servers.

After conducting further research, our assumptions are confirmed:

At the time, nearly all users are transacting through MetaMask, which route every Add Liquidity transaction via Infura’s public RPC endpoint and Infura’s servers are located in North Virginia.

More broadly, most of the Ethereum infrastructure is concentrated in that region.

As a result, AWS North Virginia proves to be the most competitive and latency-optimized setup for sniping.

We also have a very process to snipe a shitcoin:

1. Find shitcoin to snipe. We usually have 10-15 crypto friends to look for new hyped shitcoins. If you find it first, you can join the snipe with 15% size (you also take risk). Some friends made between $300k and $700k profit from finding shitcoins to snipe.
2. Find on which DEX they will list (Uniswap, Sushiswap, etc.)
3. Find the listing pair: ETH, USDT, USDC…
4. Find the wallet that will list it (on-chain work)
5. Deploy the sniping smart-contract with parameters: size & buy limit
6. Jeet all after launch, usually within 30 mins as most coins are dog shit

Polkastarter era

From October to early December, not much is happening. New launches have slowed down, and for a moment we actually believe this might be the end of sniping. We’ve built a solid stack of ETH and we’re fine just holding it. Life is good.

But in December, the shitcoin market is back. Uniswap launches are back, and a new launchpad makes its debut: Polkastarter.

Its very first sale is SpiderDAO. There’s a buy limit of 2.5 ETH per wallet but my brother realizes that this limit is only on the UI and we can still ape directly through the contract. We send a few big txs and we manage to buy 50% of the sale. We also snipe it at listing. We make $500k profit from it. We are back.

This example tells you a lot about the crypto ecosystem. Most teams are absolute clowns and have no fucking clue about what they are doing. This is actually amazing for us. We can take advantage of it. And we go for it.

Some DeFi projects are also starting to emerge with synthetic assets, which we manage to arb for $600k profit.

December marks a turning point in our journey, as my brother decides to resign from his position as a university professor.

In January, we move to Dubai and both go full-time on sniping.

Our mindset is simple: if there’s an opportunity, we take it. Even if it’s “only” $10K, we go for it. We know this window won’t last forever, and we don’t want to miss a single shot.

We make a few more wins in January, such as $PAID and $PHOON and manage to print $3M.

Most of these profits are held in ETH and ETH is max sending, from $200 when we started sniping to $1400 at the end of January. Only 5 months later.

Anti-snipe measures

From February 2021, we start to see more and more teams designing anti-snipe measures for their launch. People are getting tired of snipers (for good reasons lol) and begin implementing anti-snipe measures for their token launches.

First measure: buy limit.

During the first few minutes of a listing, you can only buy X tokens. My brother is the first to design a snipe smart-contract with a loop. In one tx, we are able to buy most of the listed supply. Every loop buys the limit amount. With this smart-contract, we really manage to nail it as most sniper competitors are not doing this.

One of our biggest edge is smart-contract innovation. My brother always finds a trick to snipe and we actually like anti-snipe measures because it makes it less competitive for us.

Second measure: buy limit per wallet.

My brother design a smart-contract with “slave” smart-contracts. The main smart-contract calls a new smart-contract for every buy.

These features are great and will be very useful in the next months as BSC mania goes wild with mooncoins.

Polkastarter prime and competition

From February 2021, this is Polkastarter era. Every coin launching on Polkastarter is max sending and is basically a 7 figs profit opportunity for snipers.

This is becoming very very competitive though. We still manage to make good profits but competition is tough.

We design a new feature that we call “suicide snipe”.

The idea is simple. We notice that many degens are trying to snipe coins without any buy limits. Our suicide snipe feature sends one more buy transaction without any buy limit and automatically sells 4 blocs after to catch everyone sniping after it.

This is not a life changing strategy but it happens very often to print 50-150 ETH from it.

At some point, competition becomes too wild and one dude known as 0x887 is just faster than everyone else. We spend hours and hours trying to improve our bot. We try to customize an Ethereum node to make it as fast as possible for sniping. We try and try and try for days. But we will never manage to be as fast as this sniper.

BSC degeneracy season

This is mid-february 2021 now. My brother and I moved to Dubai in the same residence. This is quite amazing as we have not been living in the same city for the past 6 years. We are full-time sniping. Always looking for new opportunities. Always willing to design and build new stuff.

We are still sniping on Ethereum even if the competition is wild. We are still printing but we feel like it’s not gonna last for eternity.

We hear about BSC ecosystem doing great. Some coins are performing well. We decide to ape big in $BNB at around $80 as we will probably need it to snipe anyway.

Our first snipe of BSC is a shitcoin called $BRY on 16 February. We don’t know much about the sniping meta or the competition. It’s time to find out.

200 BNB in. We sell all in 30 mins, 800 BNB profit. $80k profit. Not as much as standard profit on Ethereum but still. There is some potential.

Our second snipe will be $MATTER. 75 BNB IN. 2100 BNB out. Holy fuck. +2000 BNB profit. BNB is also very strong and by the end of February, already trading at $240. We feel an amazing potential. Top 1 sniper 0x887 doesn’t seem to care about BSC. This is FREE MONEY for us. We need to lock in and snipe everything.

March is a very prolific month. Ethereum launches are great, we manage to print a few millions on it. BSC is going absolutely wild. We print 15000 BNB profit in March, especially on $KPAD with 8300 BNB profit.

I still remember well $KPAD as this was our biggest win to date.

I’m in my apartment in Dubai. I know this launch is really hyped. I know this is gonna full send. I’m nervous. I’m sweating. I highly doubt we are going to be in. The team lists, BSCscan is laggy as fuck, I check on Pancakeswap and I see a shit ton of $KPAD on the balance. HOLY FUCK. TUNEL VISION ACTIVATED. From now I’m just an autist on my MacBook. I jeet 1% of what we have and this is worth A LOT of money. I’m shaking. Fully focused on jeeting. $2M profit in 1 hour.

Five days later, the shitcoin named $COOK is launching on multi-chain. I tell to my brother that we should focus snipe operation on HECO chain because competition is gonna be very low. Token launches on Heco, we buy for 550 BNB. We manage to bridge to BSC while no one is unlocked on BSC. We max jeet for 3000 BNB profit. This feels SO GOOD.

By end of March, $BNB is trading at $300.

BSC infrastructure & improvements

The beginning of April is calmer. We take this opportunity to travel to Maldives to chill. But when landing in Maldives, we hear about some BSC hyped shitcoins coming soon. We need to be ready.

We decide to run speed tests on BSC. At this time, BSC doesn’t work like Ethereum. On Ethereum, you need to be fast to detect the pending Add Liquidity and you need to be fast to sent your transactions to other nodes.

On BSC, we had realized a few weeks ago that the system to organize transactions within a bloc is random. When you detect a pending transaction and send one tx, your transaction can be before the Add Liquidity and then fails.

We setup 10 nodes on AWS all around the world and each node sends 50 txs trying to snipe a random test transaction. Once done on 20 batches, we do an analysis of the txs in the same bloc as the Add Liquidity tx bloc.

We draw a few conclusions from this:

• The best nodes are located in North Virginia, Frankfurt and sometimes in Tokyo
• Only the first 5-15 txs sent from one node manage to be included in the right bloc
• The most expensive servers on AWS are able to include more transactions in the right bloc

For the next snipes, we build an infrastructure of 150-200 nodes on BSC. Every node sends 10 transactions.

The AWS invoices to run such infrastructure are between $40k and $60k monthly.

This is quite challenging for my brother to run this whole infra as he has to start nodes one by one on 150 terminals. Remember, we don’t have any employees or anyone to help us on that part. We are just my brother and me.

We have a great edge on BSC as we have a lot of experience from Ethereum and we are fine to spend money on the infrastructure, which creates entry barriers for the small snipers.’

Memecoins era on BSC

We are full focus on BSC now. Sometimes, we have 6 snipes in one day. We barely have time to live. We are just sniping shitcoins. We are constantly running after time, we barely have time to improve our setup as mot of our time is spent setting up a new snipe.

I remember many snipes. Especially $PINKM (Pinkmoon) when we printed $3M in 2 hours from 120 wallets as there was a buy limit. The next day I was buying an Aventador SV.

Two BSC launchpads are getting popular in May 2021. These launchpads allow anyone to execute the listing transaction. My brother is the first one to design and build a smart-contract that list and buy the token in the same transaction.

Today this might seem trivial but back in the time, no one was doing this. I remember a week when these launchpads were going wild and we would just snipe everything, making 7 figs a day for a whole week. One night I’m out with some friends having dinner at Nammos, my brother texts me that he’s gonna snipe one thing and when I come back home, we have $1M more profit.

End of May, things are slowing down on BSC and we decide to jeet most of our $BNB at around $450.

There will be a few more snipes in June but things feel quite bearish.

The end of this sniping era actually feels like a relieve as we are completely cooked and definitely need some rest.

We will spend the whole summer traveling around and finally enjoying.

EVN win

It’s August 2021, we are enjoying summer and not doing much in crypto. We are just doing some basic stuff and we randomly find a blacklisted wallet still holding these $EVN tokens we could not sell.

$EVN has been running like crazy and there are like $1m worth of tokens (not including slippage - displaying on etherscan) on just one wallet (we had +20 wallets blacklisted).

We try a first sell for $200 on Uniswap. Successful. We are like “wow wtf maybe there’s a way to dump a small part on every wallet, maybe we can make a few k”

We try a new sell on the same wallet and we get $2k. We are like wtf and we are starting to feel it can be a very interesting afternoon.

We try another sell, all tokens of the wallet this time: we get 233 ETH (initial was 2.5 ETH).

Adrenaline is kicking in and we are rushing all blacklisted wallets to jeet everything asap on Uniswap. Some wallets are still blacklisted and some are not. No clue why. We dump and we realize we are printing millions like brrrrrr.

After 15 mins of dumping as much as we can find, we send everything to the cold wallet and we expect like $2-3m from it. It was actually $6m out of nowhere on a summer afternoon.

We still have no fucking clue what happened and why these wallets have been whitelisted.

This month, we also sell a huge stack of our ETH earned from sniping above $3k as we feel like this is time to secure our freedom.

Conclusion

That year was probably the craziest one so far for us. Starting with just $40k and no real understanding of how a blockchain worked or even a clue about Solidity.

In total, we sniped +200 shitcoins on +10 different chains. Experiencing all of this with my brother was an incredible privilege.

We went through emotions and thrills that are almost impossible to put into words.

Thanks for reading this far.

Wishing you good luck in your own journey.

– CBB

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