Hunting On Chain: Part 1

In the depths of the bear market there is less to trade and more to study in order to understand which trends will have staying power into the heart of the next cycle. This series of posts every Monday will be dedicated to finding those trends while playing deep in the trenches. Today we are going to dive deep into our setup for trading in the trenches aka discover which degen tools will help us make money in this market.

Part 1: Setup

We want to not only understand what is happening on chain but also participate in it. There are a host of tools that allow us to scan the Ethereum blockchain for the important things we care about - wallet activity, contract deployments, LP locks / burns - which will guide us in our activity on chain.

The first thing we want to do is set up all of these scanning tools.

Wallet Scanners

Cielo Finance

You are mostly going to want this one once you find certain wallets that are particularly profitable or interesting. There are many people who think they’ve found Su Zhu’s (old) wallet, or Sisyphus’s, but these have all been red herrings when I’ve looked into them. Nonetheless Cielo is great for tracking certain whale wallets for liquidity flows as well as eventual entries and exits on the coins you decide to buy.

New Contracts

Otto ETH Deployments

This one is particularly useful for finding out the quality of new contracts deployed on chain. It filters for basic spam and also has a checksum (which I’m told is important) that lets you know if the deployer wallet is associated with other contracts that are rugs. From here, you can check the Etherscan if it looks semi decent, which the one above does not.

iToken Ethereum Bot

Another great deployer bot tool, iToken tells you when 1) Contracts are deployed 2) When they are verified 3) When the Uniswap LP is about to be created and 4) When the LP is locked / burned (something to look for in meme coin launches).

This is a great tool to pair with Otto to find new contracts that look promising before they are live to the public. Once you do your DD on a new launch, you can potentially snipe it and purchase a large percentage of the supply in the first block that the liquidity pool is created.

Token Scanners

PIRBView Bot

Once tokens are live, you want to do some research on the holders of that token. Using PIRB View you can see maps of the top holders, check team wallets, detailed charts, the whole works. Below I’ve asked it for a chart of the first 70 holders of the new meme coin $CAL, which it delivers via Telegram bot in just seconds.

Trading Bots

Unibot

In the end after all of the research we do on chain we want to use our newfound alpha and actually trade it. It seems like these days all of the trading has moved to Telegram bots like Unibot. The data doesn’t really bear that out, and Unibot is actually not nearly as popular as even BananaGun or Maestro bot, but it’s hard to deny that it makes the trading experience much easier. They also have tools like auto-cancellation and MEV protection to try and protect traders where possible.

I have to say that using Unibot is a souble edged sword - it is very easy to be trigger happy when trading is as easy as clicking one button on Teleram. This is absolutely not financial advice.

Sniping Bots

You may be wondering at this point, what is the difference between a trading bot and a sniping bot? Is a sniping bot also a trading bot? And vice versa?

Don’t worry I am here to answer all of your questions, since I was equally confused when I first started doing my research.

In short, a sniping bot is a form of trading bot that lets you conduct more advanced operations on the blockchain. Sniper bots like BananaGun and Maestro are made for traders who want to pay extra on chain to skip the line and move ahead in a certain block, usually in order to buy a large portion of a certain token ahead of other people.

Sniper bots enable this sort of trading, where traders can specify the exact amounts of gas they would pay for a certain % of a token launch launch to be early, and squeeze their transaction into the same block as the creation of the LP in many cases.

The two most popular sniper bots by far are Banana Gun and Maestro Bot. These are both a series of bots that allow for things like Whale watching, sniping, buying / selling, copying wallets, and more.

This is where we will spend the most of our time going forward, as understanding how to make sense of early token launches and snipe them, or watch them and buy them post launch, will be the most likely route for us to consistently be early to hunting new activity on chain.