BetSwirling down the drain

In Australia, it swirls counter-clockwise

The background

A while back, in the Ferdy Fish Discord, someone asked why BetSwirl has so much volume on Avalanche when Ferdy Flip (just launched on Base!) is clearly the superior product.

Which is fair. I’m aware they exist, but I literally never hear anyone talking about them. How could they be out-competing our clearly superior community of retarded fish lovers?

The stats

Holy shit look at these stats.

Some of these days they’re doing 10K-20K AVAX of volume. That’s crazy! Ferdy Flip (premier casino on AVAX and Base) has only done a bit over 200K AVAX volume total over its entire lifespan. They’re doing that every month?

How is this possible, and how can we steal their users. Lets investigate.

The games

Well, they have some games. Some.

I will admit that the animated graphics for their games are very cool. They also have a single PVP game that is really interesting, but unfortunately completely unused.

They have sports betting, which seems to be just a wrapper around some other team’s product? Not sure if that’s included in their volume or not

The hell is going on here. How are they attracting this kind of participation?

The users

OK, well they have a leaderboard, let’s take a look.

Holy shit these people are big gamblers. There’s the volume, coming from mega whales. And eyeballing the subcategories for dice/coin toss/roulette I’m guessing that the stats page is strictly counting casino volume, not sports betting.

Who are they? How can I steal these gamblers?

The bots

Lets take a quick peek at the balances on Avalanche for each of these whales.

How confusing. The top 5 accounts on the leaderboard have basically zero AVAX and zero ERC-20?

Whales 1/4 are dormant (40 days and 170 days respectively) so even though they’re suspicious lets put that aside and take a look at the active whales, 2/3/5.

They have 17K, 8K, and 25K transactions respectively, which is quite a bit. To put that in perspective, I used to competitively bot Crabada and my account has 45K transactions. So having about half my transaction count is a bit suspicious.

Lets examine their behaviors though.

Whale 2

This account played Dice over 50 times in a row, over the course of 3 hours.

7 hours before that, it had been playing for about 10 hours in a row, between 10-100 times per hour.

Why only for 10 hours in a row? Well it had run out of funds and had to receive some from Coinbase.

Just a casual 4 hour pause before it got that transfer and started playing for those 10 hours. How long was it playing before that? Glad you asked, 6 hours in a row.

That is some REAL dedication, 16 hours of gambling per day. I expect all you Ferdy Flip (best memes on Avalanche and Base) fans out there to step up your game.

And of course, zero ERC-20 transactions in this account. Lets move on.

Whale 3

This whale took a nap 2 days and 8 hours ago and hasn’t woken up. How was it doing before that? It turns out that this whale is a high roller.

This account is more interesting, it regularly gets chunks of money and just immediately burns it to the ground before getting more money.

It’s a bit more interesting and less obviously bot-like in that it doesn’t play for 10 hours in a row. But it basically always gets about 75A and just slams it into BetSwirl.

Sometimes it gets lucky! After this deposit, it managed to play like 30 roulette games in a row.

This account actually does have some ERC-20 transactions, but it’s all swapping USDC for AVAX.

Whale 5

This is getting tiresome right?

Surprisingly, this account does have some ERC-20 tx. For the coin w3ULL, which is apparently related to the PLAY3ULL subnet? Confusing. This is the weirdest of the accounts, and the only one I’ve seen so far that seems even remotely like a human might occasionally press buttons.

But then again, 13 days ago it played for 6 hours in a row. And 28 days ago it played for 8 hours in a row. Gave up scrolling back and couldn’t find a single non-Betswirl interaction. So, you know, maybe not a real person.

The conclusion

You get where I’m going with this right? It’s made up. The whole thing is fake volume. I only looked at the top 5, but you can see it all over their leaderboard.

I mean, come on man. Getting funded and then starting to play literally 30 seconds later? Put at least a little effort into spoofing it.

For Ferdy Flip (not just coin flips, try our roulette!) we instantly partition the amount allocated for Ferdy Fish holders, but for BetSwirl it seems more opaque and less automatic, so they’re probably just skimming back out the amount that they washed through their volume.

Some back of the envelope math says stakers have earned about 1200 AVAX this month, and I only see about 350 AVAX deposited into the staking contract so far (or you can use Dune).

And yeah, I know their docs say that they defer the rewards over the next month, but the total rewards for last month should have been over 1600 AVAX.

The finale

Where am I going with this? No idea. Maybe Ferdy Flip (offset the decline in your coin’s price by doubling your money!) should learn from them and fake some of our KPI to get better investments.

I swear that attacking our competitors is not becoming a pattern. I’d never write one of these on our lord and savior RollBit (because they’d have me killed).

P.S. use my referral code (jokes on you every link to Ferdy Flip in this article has it).