Part 1: Cynical Hate DAO (CHD)
Not actually that hateful.
This is part 1 of a 5 part series; the index with links to other sections is here.
If you’ve been in the Crabada Discord for a few months, you might be familiar with the boogieman called ‘CHD’, best known for ruining Crabada.
I’d like to dispel some of the myths behind this mysterious shadow group blamed for the downfall of the price of TUS.
Ohm fork season
In early November 2021, a bunch of active people from the Trader Joe Discord (plus associates) started a new server devoted to searching / sharing alpha on Avalanche. This was shortly after Snowbank had launched and the people who noticed it, evaluated it, and got in early made significant returns.
It was the start of Ohm fork season on Avalanche. Everyone immediately got rugged on Santa DAO. It got so bad that we had a counter for our ‘hit rate’ on rugs.
We got pretty good at sleuthing out rugs in advance. For example, we actually figured out that Minerva DAO was a rug, started asking questions in the Discord, and they nuked the project a half hour later. Good times.
Bear season
Along with the completion of the (very obvious) rug from Snowdog, we entered bear season in December. Everything was going down. People were unhappy and coping. The phrase ‘Cynical Hate’ comes from this period.
We already had a ‘DAO’ channel where we voted on various topics related to the server.
Shortly after the name of our server became (and stayed) Cynical Hate DAO.
CHD Breeding
In January, things had recovered a little, and some of our members were making good income from their crabs. We had a channel devoted to the topic that had some frequent discussion.
In early February (after the Factional Advantage change was announced) we aped in; we raised $230K from 30 members, bought 6 virgin Craboids and 6 virgin Primes, and started breeding at a TUS price of about 33c.
By the time our second set of eggs had hatched, we were (technically, if we liquidated) in profit! We were self-sustaining in terms of TUS income two cycles later. Unfortunately around this time, TUS began its decline.
We continued breeding and stacking TUS, and TUS kept going down. We started losing money every cycle via depreciation of crab prices in TUS, and TUS price in USD.
CHD Mining
In late February, the price of TUS was 8.5c. If we liquidated all our crabs and dumped all our TUS, we would have had a 52% loss on our initial investment.
We were convinced the game would last, but breeding was becoming increasingly unprofitable as the price of crabs dropped in TUS. We approved an operational swap of mining to produce income, and breeding to expand our crab stable.
Our plan was to skim some crabs off the top of each breeding cycle, selling the rest to fund our breeding operation.
CHD Looting
Shortly after pivoting to this strategy, the ability to loot bot became available, and we started doing that full time. This was significantly more profitable than mining, and we immediately began compounding our crabs instead of selling any to fund breeding. We eventually reached 30 teams worth when TUS was approximately 10c.
At that point we began doing distributions approximately once a week, as TUS resumed its steady decline towards zero.
Anti CHD Rhetoric
Since the start of the game, botters have made looting basically impossible for humans, but CHD started to occupy a lot of angry mindspace for people in Discord/Twitter. I suppose it was a combination of having a specific target to blame, CrabadaTracker making bot performance super obvious, and frustration that the ‘anti bot’ patch was so ineffective.
Probably the biggest contributor to this misconception is the fact that one well-known user of the bot was also a known member of CHD. We had a lot of fun meming about all the flack he was getting.
Unfortunately, the truth is that CHD bought the top, failed at breeding due to declining crab/TUS prices, and months later still has not broken even (20% loss). We were exit liquidity. Understandably, our members did not appreciate claims like this one.
Or this one:
There are plenty of trolls and fudders in the Crabada Discord, and most of them are not CHD. But if you piss off a group of people that have ‘Cynical Hate’ in their name by claiming they’re getting rich by ruining the game when they’re actually deep in the red, don’t be surprised when they start trolling your server and fudding your game.
CHD has 90ish crabs. CHD did not ruin your game. I can’t tell you why this game died but if it was due to loot bots, then you should blame the devs for their game design failures.
Up Next: Part 2: Running a bot ring