The financial markets of the world have never been ‘fair’. This is a proposition that none of us would have any trouble accepting, to varying degrees. There have historically been numerous reasons behind the imbalances in market mechanisms — primary being the costs incurred to participate in the markets (cost of trading) and the costs incurred to gather adequate information so as to be able to make the ‘right’ decisions about trading (cost of market intel). One of the many facets of the revolution ushered in by the adoption of blockchain and cryptocurrency has been the affordability and access to trading markets. More particularly in the DeFi space, without any meaningful government regulation to speak of, the possibilities till date have been practically infinite. Tokens are deployed with ease, trading opened at the call of a function by the token contract owner, profits realized and lost by hundreds of traders within seconds.
This lack of regulation (till date) has been a double edged sword. It has enabled financial freedom at the global scale in ways that have never been seen on modern society. It has also granted opportunity to predatory players to extract capital from the unsuspecting participants of DeFi. Not all predatory players are criminal in intent, of course. Some are just large trading firms or TradFi veterans who have brought their battle tested strategies into the Wild West of DeFi. ‘Trading bots’ have been a staple component of the crypto trading ecosystem for years, now.
What we do at AnySniper is to make these trading tools accessible to the average retail trader and enable them to leverage technology to execute smarter and safer trades for themselves.
Our intent from Day 1 has always been to ‘level the playing field’ — make trading fairer for all. Our belief has always been that by using AnySniper, our traders will be better educated in their trading and lose less to rugpulls, over time. It has therefore been amusing to us that a lot of entrenched players in the microcap ‘memecoin’ space have subjected the project to extensive criticisms. ‘Botting is bad’, they say, with zero facts and a tiny amount of logical reasoning. This compels us to write the present post to communicate to our holders exactly what AnySniper offers to retail traders, and why it does not harm DeFi trading.
A number of factors go into ensuring that trading is profitable. Three of them are information, analysis and speed of execution and AnySniper offers its users an edge on all three fronts.
A. Information: The AnySniper Contract Scanner analyzes contract code for every token as soon as it is deployed in the blockchain network, even before it is available for trading. It does so by reverse engineering the Solidity bytecode of the target token so that investors do not need to wait for the contract owner to publish its source code. This means that typically our holders don’t even need to wait until the contract owner verifies his contract, granting an edge over other traders in being able to study the contract. This early insight also allows $SNIPE holders to set up the trading platform to bypass barriers such as deadblocks in a contract (which lead to failed transactions) whilst identifying and avoiding honeypots altogether.
B. Analysis: On one hand, our Contract Scanner offers deep insight into the contract of a target token. Additionally, our Smart Trading DApp offers a list of warning triggers when certain functions are called by a contract owner. This allows competent traders an easy reference of potentially malicious contract functions in a token to perform their own risk analysis as to whether they want to invest in the same. Yes, this may be harder for newer traders to do — but that’s why we have an exclusive chat room for $SNIPE token holders where they can extensively discuss doubts and get educated in a collaborative manner.
C. Speed of Execution: Our Smart Trading Dapp constantly monitors the mempool on the blockchain, that is, the pending transactions that we waiting to be confirmed by miners on a blockchain. By doing so, we equip our holders to anticipate and act upon a variety of trading signals. The most powerful is our ability to frontrun malicious trading activity by a contract owner, where he may want to rugpull you by removing liquidity, or raising buy/sell taxes to effectively honeypot a token, or simply blacklist your wallet to prevent you from selling. Even otherwise, our DApp, by way of its Take Profit/Stop Loss mechanism, allows you to monitor a token 24/7 and sell it automatically when it hits your desired price targets. Our Copy Trading feature, recently deployed, also leverages this constant monitoring of the mempool to smoothly copy the transactions of target traders, with minimal manual intervention from our users.
All of these processes are automated to varying degrees, or to put it differently, ‘bot’ driven. To despise ‘botting’ in an age when technology has seeped into every aspect of human existence is oddly Luddite, in our estimation. Technology has played a crucial role at the heart of trading in modern society. For instance, in Napoleonic France, between 1835 to 1837 in France, two brothers — Joseph and Francois Blanc, ‘hacked’ into the French government’s telegraph system to get market sensitive information earlier than their competitors. The semaphore telegraph line employed during those times was essentially a long line of relay towers from one city to another, which could relay important news from Paris to Bordeaux in 5 quick days. Joseph and Francois, who traded in Bordeaux, decided to bribed the operators of the telegraph line in exchange for the chance to receive information before their competitors which they then diligently used it to out-trade them for over 2 years!
In modern times, this technological arms race has only heated up. In 2010, for instance, a firm named Spread Network spent $300 million to lay fiber-optic cables from New York to Chicago in a straight line to reduce latency and enable traders to send and receive data in 13 milliseconds. This exercise was made redundant by other firms in 2011, which used microwave towers to reduce the time required to relay information to 11 milliseconds, and 8.1 milliseconds by 2015. The more recent iteration of this arms race in data transfer has been hollow core fiber cable — air filled glass tubes carrying data encoded as beams of light, taking 1/3rd of the time for data transfer when compared to standard fiber cables. Notably, Jump Trading LLC is a trading firm that have invested in a UK firm Lumenisity Limited that engineers this new kind of fiber [1] (for context, Jump Trading owns Jump Crypto, that bailed out the Solana Wormhole bridge after its recent hack of $320 million).
It goes without saying that it is beyond the capacity of the human mind and body to process and act upon trading signals down to the hundredth of a second. And yet, millions of dollars worth of profit are generated by acting upon these signals within the blink of an eye, by what are referred to as High Frequency Traders in traditional finance. Over the decades, a tremendous amount of industry opinion as well as academic scholarship has had a lot to say about the good and the bad when it comes to HFT. In the end, all that matters to the ordinary retail trader is that the algorithmic trading bots deployed by High Frequency Trading firms have transformed the landscape of trading permanently and in ways that the average trader is simply outclassed, and this technology and its owners have long held the field in crypto as well. Having said that, HFT traders are only one class of traders using automated trading tools who are firmly entrenched in every trading sphere, including that in crypto, and it is better to come to terms with this reality and trade accordingly, rather than take up outmoded ideological positions against facts.
For us at AnySniper, the intention is to offer a safe, stable and reliable trading platform that leverages technology for the benefit of the retail trader. Boiled down to its fundamentals, it offers a minute but crucial edge to $SNIPE holders whilst trading on the block chain. In the larger scheme of things, a very small portion of the actual transaction is even automated. For the uninitiated, it is important to understand how a transaction works on a blockchain. Take for instance the Ethereum blockchain: one an individual sends a transactions, first a cryptographic hash is generated to identify it, then the transaction is broadcast to the network and added to a pool with numerous other pending transactions. For a pending transaction to be successful, a miner has to pick the same and verify it on the blockchain. If a retail trader wanted to ‘snipe’ such a pending transaction, they would have to realize that it is pending in the mempool (waiting for a miner to pick and confirm) and send his transaction for confirmation before it, by paying a higher gas fee and having a faster internet connection.
We have stated in an earlier Medium post that ‘sniping’ involves identifying the correct contract address for a token, identifying the proper gas fees and programming the correct buy order in time. Every step that leads up to pulling the trigger on the buy and sell order is manual.
This is far from the practice of professional traders who use algorithms that calculate everything to the last detail, even how much the buy/sell orders should be.
Moreover, armed with all the information, analysis and speed on offer to our users, at the end, the final execution of their traders will still be incumbent upon a few variables, not the least of which are their personal internet infrastructure, the nodes they employ, and the gas fee they are ready to pay to be able to having their transactions confirmed prior to those of others in the mempool.
Approached from any direction, our intention is solely to protect $SNIPE holders from being rugpulled, educate them to be better traders so that they can conserve and deploy their capital more intelligently, and empower them to trade swiftly so as to be more profitable in the long run. We remain committed to these goals today as we were on Day 1 and shall continue to level the playing field when it comes to DeFi trading at large!
[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/high-frequency-traders-push-closer-to-light-speed-with-cutting-edge-cables-11608028200
