Once more unto the breach, dear frens!

GAME PLAN: launch clanker, turbo buy with left hand, cast about it, wait for snipers to exhaust themselves, DCA with right hand main account triggering social notifications, left hand sells, right hand hodl's.

Simples, right? Easy money, like taking money from a baby, right? Right?

Background: my FC account has ~50k followers, but not a lot of followers, if you know what I mean. My Interface account has 13 followers (devs do sthg!), and I've never seen a single person explicitly copy-trade me. I also try to trade medium-to-long term, and my addresses do not look like active-trader addresses onchain.

PLAY-BY-PLAY:

• left hand bought 0.15 ETH (>$580) as quickly as humanly possible. With multiple windows pre-loaded, I just had to copy-paste the CA from the launch cast and execute on Matcha
• 20 minutes in, snipers yet didn't stole anything, they just draw dildo on the chart. Left hand was still up ~20%
• I interacted with my launch cast (recasting, liking replies, replying), while right hand bought 0.01 ETH (<$40), then 0.015, 0.02, 0.025, 0.03, 0.035 in roughly 8 minute increments, confirming each time that reporter bots highlighted my trades in the feed
• right hand buys did NOT appear to pump the price. Rather, the early buyers, who had been active during the intense PvP period, seemed to take my injection as exit liquidity
• price went down as 5-10x more sale volume went through, while I was almost the entire buy volume
• left hand FSH'd and got only 0.11 ETH, for a loss of -27%
• right hand was fully in $SINK, and also marked down -26%

IN-GAME ADJUSTMENTS:

I would not have expected the unaware, uncoordinated and heavily PvP snipers to have me down ~25% on 2x my initial outlay. My left-hand, right-hand strategy should have been brilliant!! IRL and ngl it works on real babies 100% of the time. Totally blindsides them! Plus, I knew exactly what I was going to do, and they didn't.

I wondered if I could push the market down, then buy it back, and round-trip it. FAFO:

• right hand SSG
• little green candle. whuut.
• no reporter bot called me out
• not a single sale was reported on 3+ memecoin trading apps. whuut.
• dump the rest. little red candle, no real move, definitely less than the bid-ask spread
• claimed clanker contract rewards, a mix of ETH and $SINK
• dump the residual $SINK. teeny red candle.
• still no sales reported in feed, or in apps

ClankerCo: Your 60-40 fee split to the creator allowed me to make 15~20% ROI in a couple of hours, with a trivial strategy, minimal risk, and not-nothing-but-not-inaccessible work. I traded a little over $2k net volume, while Uniswap reports $145k (does anyone know if this counts both sides or just one??). My size was not enough to bully the market, and the price action didn't give me a free ride.

I could have spent more effort to invite market participants to buy with me. However, I expect the markets will become more efficient, faster, than any crew of part-timers would be able to adapt and improve. By definition, the market represents the marginally best strategy at extracting value; any crew would have to discover the best counter-strategies and this search is costly.

Interface, Castmoney, Banyan: if your products are just for funsies, it's fine to only report when people you follow are buying, while missing reports of sales. It was not one app only, but every app including some i won't name for relationship reasons. It appears to me that all of you are using similar, if not the same, data sources. There appear to be easily discoverable edge cases for dumpers to exploit.

I understand your incentives are to attract users. A product that is very loud about pumping, but protects dumpers from excessive scrutiny, gives off good vibes. This is a crypto problem.

• • • [Please see Update below] ** *

Other traders: Social trading products are not built for you! You get shown purchases but not sales. Did you know that. Related observation: the bots' algos do not work if they only use social signals that might be one-sided. So, social signals may still provide alpha, if used appropriately.

Owners of all social trading products responded with helpful clarifications, which I have incorporated in the text. Nobody is uninterested in the missing sale reports, and they continue to investigate the apparent edge case.

@div, founder of Castmoney, was the first to correctly identify the reason my sales were not flagged. He clarified that it was an edge case, not intentional. They are already aware of a similar, but not the same, fact pattern affecting another common platform used by many Farcaster users.

As for notifications in feed, I share with permission the private response from @holmes, founder of Banyan:

I would very much welcome suggestions
and even criticisms, as they are
extremely helpful for improving our
product.
Regarding the bot not reporting sales,
we apologize for this. The bot
currently sends around 100 trading
notifications per day, which is
already quite substantial for our
users. We are actively working on
modifying our notification strategy.
Our initial intention was to provide
users with token buy signals, which
is why we currently only screen for
buy transactions in ETH trading
pairs and don't notify about sales.
If you have any more detailed
suggestions or criticisms, we are
very willing to listen and discuss
potential improvements.

Clanker is a 1-month old project on Farcaster that makes memecoin launching easy, fun, and accessible to everyone. Unlike prior memecoin platforms (businesses which charge the user upfront and hence front-load their incentives), Clanker charges nothing to launch tokens, while keeping a portion of the ongoing long tail of transaction fees.

Some notable events:

• two agents @clanker and @aethernet birthed $18.3m market cap memecoin $LUM
• ClankerCo gave out splashy 5-figure rewards to accounts who had launched high transaction volume coins
• Warpcast team has given it plenty of airtime in the feed
• > 5 large-following FC accounts with their own pursuits have gone full-bore into memecoin trading social media influencing
• dozens of accounts active in organizing get-paid communities have discovered the allure of launching many clankers
• 100s to 1000s of inactive / lurker / new FC accounts appear to have activated in the feed
• ClankerCo announced they accumulated 700 ETH from fees, which they would spend to attract attention for creators. Of course, that also attracts competition.

At least 5 similar memecoin launcher projects launched in the past few weeks: an LLM interprets in-feed, i.e., public, text instructions to launch memecoins. Larry by @df and @stephancill has garnered a lot of attention, and @df has sparred actively with @proxystudio.eth in the feed, mainly over economic distribution.

I am not un-conflicted.

Both Proxy and Interface supported my previous project with transparent and fully-disclosed onchain advertising. I currently hold tokens for some Clanker ecosystem projects in my public ENS-linked wallets, as well as in private trading accounts.

I also launched one of the v0 clankers $BURRITO aka Burroti, paid for DexScreener verification, and continue to use the coin itself as my personal fan token to accumulate, burn and give away. It's currently <$10k market cap. My public ENS-linked addresses have purchased ~24% of free float on the open market (~8.9% of total supply).

h/t Dan Finlay for a very thoughtful blog post on his own experience launching a clankercoin $CONSENT.

TYSM to readers who provided early feedback. I will be dropping you $BURRITO as a token of appreciation.