"From Ethereum to BSC, the million-dollar game of on-chain sniping."
Written by: CBB
Translated by: Tia, Techub News
August 2020.
My brother teaches information technology at a university. I had just finished a year and a half as a product manager at an insurance company.
The cryptocurrency market had been terrible in recent years, slowly recovering from the crash caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. We had caught a few opportunities on Binance Launchpad, but our entire portfolio barely amounted to around $50,000.
We started hearing about a new protocol called Uniswap. Friends were playing with various shitcoins there, often making three to four times their investment within a few hours. We had no idea what it was, but our instincts told us this time was different.
A friend told me about "sniping." He said that when bZx launched its token on Uniswap, a bot made $500,000 in a single transaction. It seemed unreal.
My brother and I were shocked. We wanted to figure out how this was done.
My brother knew nothing about Solidity. We hadn't even really understood how blockchain worked.
First Sniping
At the end of August. We were on vacation in Spain with our family. My brother had started learning Solidity a few days earlier because we wanted to try sniping on Uniswap.
A token was about to launch: YMPL. The hype looked good. We organized a sniping operation and invited a few friends to join in. We were newbies (fish) and didn't want to take on the risk alone.
We invested 50 ETH (about $20,000 at the time). YMPL launched. We successfully sniped 8% of the initial supply. I logged into Uniswap and sold it within 30 minutes.
Profit? 60 ETH (about $30,000). Our entire portfolio was less than $50,000. We were ecstatic. It felt like "easy money."
We wanted more.
Two days later, a new sniping opportunity: $VIDYA.
This time we used the profits from the last time, and our first success boosted our confidence. We invested 165 ETH and made 159 ETH in 15 minutes, even more outrageous than before.
Four days later, another new sniping opportunity. We invested 460 ETH and made 353 ETH, $135,000. This was our first six-figure profit, completed in less than an hour. The feeling was explosive.
Uniswap was booming. Trading volume skyrocketed. Crypto speculators flooded in. It all seemed too easy, and we knew this opportunity wouldn't last forever. We had to get stronger and figure out how sniping really worked.
How Does Sniping Work?
To launch a token on Uniswap, the team must add liquidity to a pool. In our previous snipes, we would watch for the "Add-Liquidity" transaction to be packed on-chain, then we would send our buy order—usually resulting in a delay of one block.
Some competitors could successfully enter within the same block as the add liquidity transaction.
After some research, we realized that by running an Ethereum node, we could monitor the public mempool and see pending transactions before they were confirmed on-chain.
Starting in September, this is how sniping worked for us:
Monitor the mempool, keeping an eye on pending add liquidity transactions.
Immediately send a buy transaction at the same gas price.
The goal was to be packed in the same block after the add liquidity transaction.
A New Era of Ethereum Sniping
It was mid-September 2020.
We had just gone through ten days of calm with no new projects launching. It was the perfect time to upgrade our bot. We were now ready.
However, we faced a new challenge: the summer was over. My brother was still teaching information technology at the university. Sometimes, sniping would happen while he was in class.
Fortunately, due to COVID, everything was remote.
When a launch was approaching, he would tell his students, "Do ten minutes of research." This was his way of freeing up time to handle the sniping.
The next target was $CHADS. We were ready to snipe with 200 ETH. We knew this one would be good—the hype was extremely high.
My brother and I were on a voice call. We were nervous and under a lot of pressure.
He was the first to see the "Add Liquidity" transaction appear on the terminal. When the bot detected it, he said in a serious tone:
Ça part. (Sorry, we are French) (meaning "This is happening.")
I will never forget that phrase. He would say it before every sniping session, with the same tone, instantly triggering an adrenaline rush each time.
As soon as I heard it, I frantically refreshed Etherscan like a madman, waiting to see if our ETH balance dropped to zero—that was our signal that we had entered.
We entered. 200 ETH. The candlestick chart skyrocketed. My job was to manually sell on Uniswap.
The numbers for $CHADS were incredible. My hands were shaking, I was sweating profusely, completely in tunnel vision (only focused on the screen), selling off as much as possible to realize profits.
In the end, we netted 675 ETH (about $270,000). It felt unbelievable. But we were exhausted from the pressure and adrenaline.
No time to rest. Three days later: $FRONTIER. Same setup, same pressure. Made 800 ETH.
Two days later: $LINA, +80 ETH. The next day: $CHARTEX, +700 ETH.
In six days, we made a total profit of 2300 ETH. It was insane. A month ago, we had been in the crypto space for years, and our maximum was only around $100,000.
September 18 brought a surprise: Uniswap airdrop. Any address that had interacted with Uniswap was eligible to claim.
Since we had been doing large-scale testing for weeks, we had a lot of eligible addresses. Each address could claim about $20,000. I remember my brother went through every wallet he could find, pulling out a six-figure amount in total.
Our last sniping of the month was $POLS, the token for Polkastarter—later that year it would become the GOAT (Greatest of All Time) among launch platforms.
Smart Contract and Infrastructure Improvements
It was time to improve our bot again.
In our first month of sniping, we used a buy limit strategy, for example: hoping to get at least Y tokens with X ETH. Using this system, we had to send transactions in batches, especially since we often didn't know how much liquidity the team would add.
For example:
If the team only added 20 ETH of liquidity, and we tried to buy with 200 ETH, our limit price would be inappropriate.
My brother designed a new system: set the minimum token amount Y per 1 ETH unit, then keep buying as much as possible until reaching that limit. We were among the first to implement such a system.
We also encountered a problem: we never knew whether the team would add liquidity in ETH, USDT, or USDC. So my brother designed a smart contract that could purchase tokens regardless of the launch pair.
We also worked on increasing the speed of our bot. During the $CHAD snipe, we made a lot of money, but we definitely weren't the fastest sniper after the liquidity was added.
We deployed Ethereum nodes in multiple regions, racing them to snipe the same transaction. We soon discovered that the node hosted in North Virginia was more stable and faster.
This led us to believe that North Virginia was the best location for running sniping servers.
Further research confirmed our hypothesis:
At that time, almost all users traded through MetaMask, which forwarded each "Add Liquidity" transaction through Infura's public RPC endpoint, and Infura's servers were located in North Virginia.
More broadly, most Ethereum infrastructure was concentrated in that area.
Therefore, running in the North Virginia region of AWS proved to be the most advantageous for competitive and latency optimization, suitable for sniping.
We also developed a very streamlined method for sniping shitcoins:
Find the shitcoin to snipe. We usually have 10-15 friends in the crypto circle responsible for finding the next wave of hype shitcoins. If you are the first discoverer, you can join the sniping with a 15% position (you also take on the risk). Some friends made $300,000 to $700,000 by discovering shitcoins to snipe.
Find out which decentralized exchange (DEX) they will launch on (Uniswap, Sushiswap, etc.).
Identify the trading pairs: ETH, USDT, USDC, etc.
Find the wallet that will initiate the listing (on-chain investigation).
Deploy the smart contract for sniping and set parameters: scale and buy limit.
Sell everything after the launch (jeet), usually completed within 30 minutes, as most coins are shit (poor performance/value).
The Polkastarter Era
From October to early December, the market was calm. The speed of new project launches slowed down, and for a while, we really thought this might be the end of the sniping era. We accumulated a considerable amount of Ethereum and were content to hold, living quite comfortably.
But in December, the shitcoin market made a comeback. New projects on Uniswap started launching frequently again, and a new launchpad—Polkastarter—also emerged.
Its first sale project was SpiderDAO. The purchase limit for a single wallet was 2.5 ETH, but my brother discovered that this limit was just a front-end interface (UI) restriction, and we could still buy directly through the smart contract. We sent several large transactions and ultimately bought 50% of the sale. We also sniped at launch. This time we made $500,000.
We were back.
This example illustrates the state of the cryptocurrency ecosystem: most teams are a bunch of complete fools who have no idea what they are doing. This was a godsend for us, and we could profit from it. So we went all in.
Some DeFi projects also began to emerge, launching synthetic assets, and we made another $600,000 through arbitrage.
December became a turning point in our lives—my brother decided to resign from his university professor position.
In January, we moved to Dubai and started full-time sniping.
Our philosophy was simple: seize every opportunity. Even if it was "only" $10,000, we would go all out. We knew opportunities were fleeting and didn't want to miss any chance.
In January, we won several times again, such as with $PAID and $PHOON, totaling about $3 million.
Most of these profits were held in ETH, which was also skyrocketing—from $200 when we started sniping to $1,400 by the end of January. Just five months had passed.
Anti-Sniping Mechanisms
Starting in February 2021, we saw more and more teams designing "anti-sniping measures" for their token launches. People began to grow tired of snipers (which is understandable, to be honest, haha), so they added various protective mechanisms for token launches.
First Measure: Buy Limit.
In the first few minutes after launch, you could only buy a limited number of tokens. My brother was the first to design a sniping smart contract with "loop logic." In a single transaction, we could buy the limited quantity multiple times, allowing us to acquire most of the available tokens. With this smart contract, we easily crushed other competitors, as most snipers' scripts lacked this mechanism.
One of our biggest advantages was our innovation in smart contracts. My brother always found new ways to break through limitations. We even liked the anti-sniping measures—because they actually reduced competition.
Second Measure: Purchase Limit per Wallet.
My brother designed a system with "slave contracts": the main contract would call a new slave contract for each purchase, thus bypassing the per-wallet limit.
These new features were excellent and would play a significant role in the upcoming frenzy of BSC (Binance Smart Chain) meme coins.
The Golden Age of Polkastarter and Competition
Starting in February 2021, we entered the golden age of Polkastarter. Every token launched on Polkastarter could "take off at full speed," presenting almost seven-figure profit opportunities for snipers.
However, competition became extremely fierce. We could still maintain decent profits, but the pressure from competition was increasing.
So we designed a new feature called "suicide snipe."
The idea was simple: we noticed that many "degens" (mindless speculators) would snipe tokens without purchase limits. Our suicide snipe feature would issue an unlimited buy transaction after these people, then automatically sell four blocks later to harvest those latecomer snipers.
This wasn't a life-changing strategy, but it often brought in profits of 50 to 150 ETH.
Competition became exceptionally intense, with a guy codenamed 0x887 far ahead of everyone else. We spent countless hours trying to improve our bot. We attempted to customize Ethereum nodes to push their speed to the limits of sniping. Day after day, we tried but could never surpass this sniper.
BSC Frenzy Season
By mid-February 2021, my brother and I moved into the same apartment in Dubai. It felt amazing—we hadn't lived in the same city for six years. Now we were full-time snipers, constantly searching for new opportunities and designing and building new tools.
We were still sniping on Ethereum, despite the fierce competition. We were still making money, but we had a vague feeling it wouldn't last long. We heard that the BSC ecosystem was performing strongly, with some tokens skyrocketing. So we decided to heavily invest in $BNB, buying in at around $80, knowing we would use it for sniping later.
Our first sniping on BSC was on February 16, a shitcoin called $BRY. We knew nothing about the BSC sniping ecosystem or the competitive landscape. It was time to find out.
We invested 200 BNB. Thirty minutes later, we sold everything for a profit of 800 BNB. About $80,000 in profit. Although it was less than the hundreds of thousands we made on Ethereum, we saw the potential.
The second sniping was $MATTER.
Our second target was $MATTER, entering with 75 BNB and exiting with 2100 BNB. My God! Profits exceeded 2000 BNB. The price of BNB was also very strong, rising to $240 by the end of February. We felt it had huge potential. The top sniper 0x887 seemed indifferent to BSC. This was free money! We had to lock in all positions and go for it.
March was harvest season. Projects on Ethereum remained active, and we made several million dollars again. Meanwhile, BSC went completely crazy—we made 15,000 BNB in March, with $KPAD alone bringing in 8300 BNB.
I still remember $KPAD—it was our biggest victory to date.
I was in my apartment in Dubai. I knew this launch would be very hot, and I was determined to go all out. I was nervous and sweating. I seriously doubted whether we could participate. The team list was jammed on BSCscan, and when I checked Pancakeswap, it was flooded with $KPAD. Oh my God! Tunnel vision activated! From now on, I was just an autistic person sitting in front of a MacBook. I only needed to put in 1% of all our assets to make a fortune. I was shaking with excitement. I focused entirely on making money. I made $2 million in one hour!
Five days later, a cryptocurrency called "garbage coin" was launched. The $COOK token went live on multiple chains. I told my brother we should focus our sniping operations on the HECO chain because the competition would be low. The token launched on HECO, and we bought in with 550 BNB. We successfully bridged to BSC, where no one had unlocked it yet. We maximized our profit at 3000 BNB. It felt amazing!
By the end of March, the trading price of $BNB was $300.
BSC Infrastructure & Improvements
In early April, things were calm, so we took the opportunity to relax in the Maldives. But as soon as we arrived, we heard about some hyped altcoins about to launch. We had to be prepared.
We decided to conduct speed tests on BSC. Currently, BSC operates differently from Ethereum. On Ethereum, you need to quickly detect pending liquidity requests and send transactions to other nodes rapidly.
On BSC, we realized weeks ago that the organization of transactions within blocks is random. When you detect a pending transaction and send a transaction, your transaction might execute before the "add liquidity" operation, causing it to fail.
We set up 10 nodes on AWS around the world, with each node sending 50 transactions, trying to intercept a random test transaction. After completing 20 batches of tests, we analyzed transactions that were in the same block as the "add liquidity" transaction.
We concluded the following:
The fastest nodes were in North Virginia, Frankfurt, and sometimes Tokyo;
The first 5-15 transactions sent by each node had a chance of being packed into the correct block;
The most expensive servers on AWS could include more transactions in the correct block.
So we built an infrastructure for subsequent sniping that included 150-200 BSC nodes. Each node sent 10 transactions.
Running such infrastructure cost us between $40,000 and $60,000 per month on AWS.
For my brother, running this infrastructure was quite challenging, as he had to start nodes on 150 terminals. Keep in mind, we had no employees or helpers. It was just the two of us.
We had a massive advantage in BSC projects because we had rich experience on Ethereum and were willing to invest in infrastructure, which set a barrier to entry for smaller bidders.
The Era of Memecoins on BSC
We were now fully invested in BSC. Sometimes, we had to snipe six times in a day. We had almost no time to enjoy life. We were just sniping shitcoins. We were racing against time, with hardly any time to improve our equipment because most of our time was spent setting up new sniping points.
I remember many snipes. Especially $PINKM (Pinkmoon), when we printed $3 million in two hours using 120 wallets due to the purchase limit. The next day, I bought a Lamborghini Aventador SV.
In May 2021, two BSC token issuance platforms quickly became popular. These platforms allowed anyone to execute token listing transactions. My brother was the first to design and build a smart contract that could complete both the listing and purchase of tokens in a single transaction.
It may seem trivial now, but at the time, no one was doing it. I remember one week when these launchpads were overflowing with goods, and we were frantically sniping, making $7 million every day for a week straight. One night, while dining with friends at Nammos restaurant, my brother texted me that he was about to snipe a product, and by the time I got home, we had made another $1 million in profit.
By the end of May, BSC's business began to slow down, and we decided to lay off most of our employees. $BNB was around $450.
June might see some minor declines, but the overall situation remained quite pessimistic.
The end of the sniping era actually felt like a relief because we were exhausted and absolutely needed a good rest.
We planned to travel around and enjoy ourselves throughout the summer.
Victory with $EVN
Now it was August 2021, and we were enjoying the summer, not paying much attention to cryptocurrency. We were just doing some basic operations when we accidentally discovered a blacklisted wallet that still held some cryptocurrencies. $EVN was a token we couldn't sell.
$EVN was running very fast, with tokens worth about $1 million in a single wallet (not including slippage - displayed on Etherscan) (we had over 20 wallets blacklisted).
We tried our first $200 sale on Uniswap. It was successful. At that moment, we thought, "Wow, this is great, maybe we can put a small portion into each wallet, and perhaps we can make a few thousand dollars."
We attempted a new sale operation with the same wallet and ended up making $2,000. We were stunned, thinking this afternoon might be quite interesting.
We tried to sell again, this time selling all the tokens in the wallet: we received 233 ETH (initially worth 2.5 ETH).
Adrenaline surged, and we quickly transferred all the coins from the blacklisted wallets to Uniswap. Some wallets were still blacklisted, while others were not, with no idea why. We frantically sold off, then realized we were printing millions of coins like a money printer.
After spending 15 minutes transferring as much money as possible, we stored everything in a cold wallet, expecting to make $2 million to $3 million. In the end, on a summer afternoon, we unexpectedly gained $6 million.
We still had no idea what had happened or why these wallets were blacklisted.
This month, we also sold a large amount of ETH obtained through sniping above $3,000 because we felt it was time to secure our freedom.
Conclusion
That year was probably the craziest year we've had so far. We started with only $40,000, completely clueless about how blockchain worked, and knew nothing about Solidity.
We sniped over 200 shitcoins across more than a dozen different blockchains. It was a tremendous honor to experience all of this with my brother.
We went through emotions and excitement that are hard to describe in words.
Thank you for reading this far.
Wishing you all the best on your journey.
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