ARENA Token Launch

The most exciting 3 blocks on Avalanche in the last six months

On October 29th, after enough delays to send @knobs to a mental institution, the ARENA token finally went live. A few hours later, the chart is truly cracked out.

So what happened in that first huge hump? Let’s take a look at the first three blocks of the arena launch and some of the big winners and losers to find out.

Big thanks to @pecio for assisting with identifying some of the interesting info.

Background

The last time I wrote about The Arena [1, 2], it was controlled by a bunch of mentally handicapped scoundrels hell-bent on driving it into the ground.

Since then, it was taken over by Jason Desimone and had a significant amount of development work invested in it, culminating in a recent $2M raise announcement.

As part of this effort, the bullshit points the original team handed out (but never really planned on doing anything with) have been converted into tokens, with the TGE occurring yesterday (tokenomics).

At launch, 4K AVAX was paired with 32M ARENA, and 640M ARENA was claimable by users starting about a half hour after trading opened. At time of writing, 285M ARENA had been claimed, 156M of which (55%) was deposited into a staking contract by users.

Prior to launch

One interesting thing to note is that the ARENA token was a well-known contract address, allowlisted by the Trader Joe team in advance. As such, a number of users added single-sided buy liquidity in AVAX prior to launch (they wanted to buy tokens with AVAX). This becomes relevant later on.

Block 52414724 - LP Added by the Arena team

What a lot of people (apparently) are waiting for occurs and trading opens.

But what else happens in that block? Turns out quite a lot. Lets go over the other transactions to see what people were doing.

And if you’re wondering how people knew to get the transactions in the same block, the answer (generally) is that they did not; they just spammed transactions every second until they succeeded.

Well, the good ones did. This guy did kind of a bad job at it.

Too fast!

All these people landed earlier in the block than the liquidity add, which happened at a very sedate 26 gwei. The most aggressive buyer in this block used a gwei of 375.

Usually people think ‘use a higher gas price to make sure you succeed’ but that doesn’t work out when you need a transaction to finish before your swap will succeed.

Some of them landed in the next block, others (like the guy in the previous section) missed for blocks later.

In particular notice that 6,690A snipe failure, we’ll talk about that later.

Just right

This is a bot (botter 1) that has access to validators detect events like this and ensure that it can land transactions precisely, maybe even influence the order of transactions with the same gas? The caller didn’t spam transactions and still landed. They bought 95K ARENA for 12A and apparently paid 9A in fees to the botter or validator, who knows.

This is a less sophisticated bot (botter 2) that spammed transactions instead of landing precisely. I think they just got lucky landing on the exact gas needed to come after the add liquidity transaction.

Slower but still failed?

A surprising number of transactions landed afterwards but reverted in that block, at least 14 from 4 different bots.

Here you can see an example of one person running a number of bots against the same contract.

It seems to have failed because it wanted to get more tokens out of the swap.

Another one has ‘FlashLoan’ in the trace; an attempt to arb V1 / V2 pools perhaps?

A few others are dupes from the already successful swap who managed to land like 4 transactions in this block.

One guy mistakenly sent his swaps to the V2.2 router, oof.

Block 52414725 - ‘normal’ snipers in the mix

The very next block is the first time you could possibly see a transaction from a person who waits for LP to be added, and then tries to buy. But realistically, it’s pretty hard to land next block, especially if your bot simulates the buy to make sure it will succeed before sending it. Even if you blind buy, good chance you can’t find out about the LP add and get your transaction included in the next one.

First buyer (botter 3) landed 75A for 570K ARENA @ 500 gwei.

Second buyer (botter 4) is a bit more interesting, got 20A for 150K ARENA @ 50 gwei. But they sent 3 follow up tx in the next few blocks to the V2 router, which failed at first but later succeeded due to an arb!

Surprisingly few transactions this block, only 12. Once again, several people who tried to buy but used the wrong router, submitted the wrong parameters, or approved the wrong amount of WAVAX (like this poor soul who spammed the wrong TX and eventually gave up with no ARENA).

Block 52414726 - the Sigma crew arrives

Things get spicy in this block with 89 transactions, many of them from the popular Sigma bot. It does some verification to ensure it will succeed before issuing transactions, so 2 blocks later is pretty impressive.

The first bot in the block (botter 5) used an insane 50K gwei for gas, paying 10A for transaction fee, and bought 300A for 1.7M ARENA.

Not really much more to say about this, block is mostly Sigma bots and a few others, a few sizable buys in there.

Block 52414727 - a whale and an arb bot

Only 22 transactions in this block, most bots are out of the way. But our friend the 6690A buyer has returned for another go at it (unfortunately for him, fortunately for all the people who bought last block).

Looks like this contract bought in 6 different chunks and then split the proceeds out to a number of different accounts.

But then something even more interesting happens. The whale has massively shifted the price of the token between the V1 and V2 LPs, opening the doors to an arb bot to extract some risk-free money.

The arb bot slides in after the last successful swap in the block to take 1,700A for itself by re-balancing the pools.

That’s all, folks

Well, that’s it for the interesting blockchain stuff anyway. The subsequent blocks are nothing special.

But now that you’ve seen more than 8K AVAX pumped into the coin in the first few blocks, the reason the opening of the chart looks like this is probably a bit easier to understand.

Lets see how our winners did

The winners are all the bots that got in before that one account yeeted almost 7K avax into the LP, and then dumped on him. Fucking oooooof. Imagine if they had the right gas, or had landed a follow up transaction in the next block, chart would look quite a bit different.

Botter 1 (from block 1) not only staked it, they manually swapped for more tokens and staked those too, and has seemingly been distributing some to ticket holders.

Botter 2 (from block 1) dumped pretty early for a sizable profit, 80A → 600A

Botter 3 (from block 2) did a pretty nice job dumping the pico top, flipping 75A into 600A.

Botter 4 didn’t do the best job with their second buy, but still flipped 40A into 160A.

Botter 5 waited a bit too long to dump, but still flipped their 300A into 1270A.

Botter 6’s tokens mostly eventually ended up here, they staked 11.6M tokens which are currently worth about 1700A.

Looking back

I personally grossly underestimated the interest in buying this token at launch. 7K AVAX in the first 6 seconds, really?

It was pretty easy to identify the LP holding accounts prior to launch and figure out how much (roughly) they were going to put in. It was also easy to find the vesting contract and then to locate the proof necessary to claim tokens.

My plan was to claim tokens early and add single sided sell LP at 1 ARENA = 1 AVAX, wrecking any botter using infinite slippage (a common autosnipe setting). I scripted it and everything!

Unfortunately for me (but correctly, honestly) the Arena team didn’t set the Merkle root necessary to claim my tokens until after trading was already live.

Once that became obvious, I just kind of half-assed it and used Sigma to buy a small amount of tokens. I benefited a lot from the 6.6K AVAX buy, woot.

But I could have done a lot better; I know all the tricks to land in the start block, I just assumed it wouldn’t be worth the effort.

Whoops. Will try harder next time.