The counter-tricking is getting more and more intense, but the smart hair-tricking person still earns tens of thousands of dollars a month

"Now the project owner is not as good as the trading platform." Arez's hair-lifting studio has turned 80% of its energy to trading platform arbitrage this year.

Before the May Day holiday, the information about "Register Coinbase and get 200U airdrops" in the group also confirmed this trend of turning.

This cycle is a cycle where people with hair sucking are backwards. Most of the hair sucking studios with no grains have been closed, and most of the hair sucking KOLs have also transformed into other tracks. For example, old hair sucking KOLs like Bingfrog have transformed into "project rights protection bloggers."

Against this background, Rhythm BlockBeats noticed that some studios with more sensitive sense of smell have already turned their guns: some have turned to trading platforms and accurately sniped in the spillover of liquidity; some have returned to traditional new stocks, turning the Hong Kong stock market into new cash machines; and some have quietly started a business of selling water and infrastructure, making more stable money flows.

CEX: New hunting grounds with liquidity spillover

"The current project party wants to divide all the tokens by themselves." Arez said with a wry smile.

In the last cycle, the studios were accustomed to revolving around the project

• Lu Test Network, Lu Airdrop, and Lu Community activities. However, as the overall market liquidity shrinks, in order to ensure the ability to control the market after going online and save limited budgets, the project party generally adopts a strategy of compressing community quotas: the airdrop rewards have been greatly reduced, and the proportion of tokens that retail investors can get has been reduced again and again.

The standard black boxing of test networks and airdrops and the reduction of rewards have made it increasingly difficult for ordinary hair-fighters to make profits. This change directly led to the elimination of a large number of small studios, and the hair-pulling ecology accelerated the inversion. Faced with the exhaustion of the project's hair care channels, the studios have to find a new battlefield.

"In the past, it was very profitable to do projects, but this cycle was different." Arez sighed. "Now, many project parties are actually working for trading platforms and market makers. How can they distribute meat to outsiders?"

The trading platform still has the largest capital pool and active users. Therefore, trading platforms have become a new target in the eyes of people who are fucked.

In order to promote the listing of coins, promote new products, and cultivate user habits, the trading platform continues to spend money and releases a lot of incentives. Whether it is IDO new issuance, trading volume rewards, or volume arbitrage, the liquidity of the trading platform has spilled out into a new opportunity depression. This also provides a new hunting ground for the hair-lushing studios.

Wallet IDO New

"Every time we have an IDO in Binance wallet, there is no problem with having 200 accounts," Arez said. If calculated based on the profit of US$30 to 50 per account, after an IDO, the income of their team is equivalent to the salary income of domestic white-collar workers for half a year.

Not only Arez, but Lao Zhang's studio also found an opportunity in the trading platform to pick hair.

As early as the Worldcoin period, Lao Zhang accumulated a batch of KYC resources, and now he has taken advantage of the trend to enter various activities of the trading platform.

Usually, the studio will cooperate with KYC suppliers, brushing platforms, etc. to form a profit distribution mechanism: the supply chain provides identity resources, the studio is responsible for batch operations, and finally jointly allocate the benefits of airdrops or new currency arbitrage.

Take Binance Wallet Launchpool as an example. The dividends in the early stages are extremely generous, and each account can make a profit of nearly $100 in one event. However, as the number of players surges, the platform continues to raise the threshold: such as wallet transaction volume within a month, the introduction of KYC facial recognition, limited operation time, Alpha points, etc.

Source: Biter Gua

"At the beginning, we mainly used KYC resources from Vietnam and the Philippines, and the cost was relatively low." Lao Zhang recalled. However, with the addition of more complex face-scanning verification and short-term operation for Binance Wallet, overseas KYC resources are becoming increasingly difficult to apply on a large scale.

"So now, we basically talk about KYC resources ourselves and no longer rely on channel dealers." Lao Zhang said.

Source: Pump Superman

However, even with more flexible resource allocation, Arez admitted that as the threshold continues to increase and the over-subsidy multiples hit new highs, the preparation volume and cost required to make a Launchpool also rise.

"Now it's rolled up, there are too many monks and less porridge, after all, the profits in each period are decreasing," he said. Therefore, studios are constantly looking for new opportunities and no longer relying solely on IDO to create a new path.

"We will rush whatever the platform promotes"

"The reward logic of a trading platform is essentially buying data with money," Arez concluded.

In addition to IDO new products, trading platforms often launch various trading rewards or airdrop activities in order to promote new products. Usually concentrated in the early stages of new products being launched, users are required to complete a certain transaction volume or deposit volume, with generous rewards and rapid distribution.

"Actually, the reason is very simple. Wherever the platform lacks trading volume, there will be the largest activity subsidy." Arez told Rhythm BlockBeats that they have dedicated personnel and interfaces to watch the announcement changes of major trading platforms, and can quickly capture any opportunity.

In order to accurately hit the big hair, Arez spent a lot of time pondering the strategic styles of major trading platforms. He compared the competitive situation of trading platforms to the situation where countries compete for hegemony during the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period.

"Each platform is like a vassal state, with different national conditions and different playing methods. Our mission is to find our own opportunities in these small wars." Arez said with a smile, citing an example that is often spoken by the team: "When Shang Yang reforms, he would have to make a reward and punishment, saying that who could carry this wood to the north gate and reward ten gold, because no one went there, the bounty rose again and again, and to fifty gold, and someone went up to take it and got the bounty."

In his opinion: Coinbase recently launched a 200U registration airdrop, which is behind it to support its contract trading sector and make up for its long-term shortcomings; Bybit vigorously promotes payment card functions and launches a series of card cashback activities; Gate is also promoting some new functions of meme... "The truth is the same, and the essence is the same as the Qin State 's reform reward of ten golds today and Zhao State's reform reward of hardware tomorrow. "

"My goal is that we are the first to carry the wood," Arez said. In the new round of trading platform competition, he is more willing to be the first person to test the waters and eat meat first: " You can pick whatever the platform wants to promote and eat meat with the platform. "

When the airdrop of the project party became a black box game, the trading platform became the "main force of money scattering" in the new cycle: from the IDO of Binance Launchpool, to the real money in the Coinbase contract track, and to the traffic battle of Bybit payment cards, the studio with a keen sense of smell has long turned its guns. With the liquidity spillover of these trading platforms, studios with keen sense of smell have once again found their own way to survive.

Eat more fish: low-risk arbitrage + air-filling

In addition to participating in activities and IDO new stocks, some more segmented studios have explored the dual income model of arbitrage + airdrop on the trading platform . The Backpack trading platform is a typical case.

Here I strongly recommend the interview article published by Cookie last week

• " Backpack+AI, code novices can also make money with low risk in scripting ." In the article, I interviewed a high-play CJ who made arbitrage script on the Backpack platform and shared many techniques and ideas that are highly practical and can be used directly:

For example, use multiple strategies, such as buying SOL in spot, and shorting SOL in the contract market, then mentioning spot to participate in the liquidity pool (LP Farming) on ​​the chain to earn handling fees, and superimposing airdrop expectations from different platforms to achieve more food; for example, through dialogue with AI assistants (such as Cursor), the logic is constantly corrected and optimized, and a script system for automated trading and interaction was finally built, which greatly improved the efficiency of arbitrage and airdropping.

On a trading platform with liquidity spillover, airdrops through trading arbitrage have become an important weapon for the new generation of studios. Especially platforms like Backpack that have the expectation of issuing coins and can support multi-strategic arbitrage have become a must-fight place for hair-fighting studios.

Hong Kong stocks "Little Spring", studios return to their old business

In addition to looking for opportunities for liquidity spillover on trading platforms, some of the faster-responding Maozhu Studios have also turned their attention to Hong Kong stocks to invest in new stocks.

"Since the currency circle is difficult to make money, it is better to go to the traditional market to find meat." Arez told Ryu BlockBeats that this year their studio has begun to set up a Hong Kong stock new stock issuance team , which is dedicated to the IPO subscription projects of Hong Kong stocks. Since the second half of 2024, the performance of new stocks in Hong Kong stocks has been extremely impressive, ushering in a "small spring" market, and has become a new source of cash flow for many hair-fighting studios.

Among these new stocks, Mixue Ice City and Mao Geping performed particularly well: Mixue Ice City soared by more than 47% on its first day of listing, and its net profit of nearly HK$10,000 was won . As a well-known high-end beauty brand, Mao Geping's first-day increase was nearly 58% after its listing. A single account only needs HK$2,880 to subscribe for 10 lots, and the final average household income exceeded HK$16,000 .

"I will look at a few points for Hong Kong stocks to invest in new stocks: good fundamentals, high market popularity, large-cap stocks, low issuance valuation, and high subscription multiples. The winning rate can be above 70%. Arez said that their current winning rate and certainty in new stocks to invest in new stocks are far greater than those in the currency circle projects.

In the currency circle, the current project-side airdrop standards themselves have been completely "blackboxed". Most projects no longer disclose any standards, and even directly control the list in the background: the proportion of retained addresses has been greatly improved; the standards are vague and the scoring system is privatized, and ordinary hairbrushers almost completely lose their predictability; the success rate of "drinking soup behind the project" has dropped sharply. Some resource-based studios even rely on their private relationship with the project party: the project party directly allocates airdrop standards to the partner; the studio produces interactive addresses in batches according to the agreed agreement to ensure that the interactive data meets the standards; the airdrop is distributed proportionally after the airdrop is issued. But obviously, this opportunity belongs to only a few players with resources and relationship chains, and ordinary studios are basically excluded.

In contrast, Hong Kong stocks seem to be much more pure.

At the same time, like the competition between trading platforms in the currency circle, Hong Kong brokerages are also rushing to open accounts: brokerages such as Yaocai, Huasheng, and Tiger have launched "commission-free" discounts, and there are also transferring warehouses to get stocks, some brokerages get 100 shares of Tencent Holdings, and some brokerages give Buffett's heavily-owned stock Occupy Petroleum...

Therefore, the leverage of new financing provided by securities companies has also been higher. "In the past, securities companies gave 10 times leverage, and a few securities companies could give 20 times 30 times, but since the second half of last year, securities companies could give 50 times or even 100 times leverage," Arez said.

(Note: 10 times financing leverage means that the cost of new account is compressed to 1/10 of the original)

Sell ​​"water", rent servers, and earn money from hair-fighting people

There are a large number of "hair-picking players", and there is a hair-picking business to do.

As the project party’s review of IP sources and interactive environments becomes increasingly strict, it is no longer realistic to use the overwhelming IP (commonly known as the thousand-person riding IP) to get fucked. Mainland IP is frequently blocked by project parties, and overseas IP has become a hard requirement for some project interactions; multi-number operation requires a large number of independent IPs to prevent associated account bans; node and hang-up projects (such as Nillion, Grass, etc.) have extremely high requirements for server stability and IP purity.

As a result, professional server and IP suppliers emerged.

The service process of a typical server IP provider includes: providing overseas cloud servers (such as ByteDance's Volcano Engine, AWS, Hetzner, Tencent Cloud International Edition, etc.); configuring stable independent IP; pre-installing the basic environment required for interaction (system, wallet, script, toolkit, etc.); some high-end services even provide customized solutions such as node optimization, traffic distribution, and script deployment.

Byteplus.Pro is doing such a business. Since the Grass project, Miko, the founder of Byteplus.Pro, has noticed this small trend and started the Web3 business with the traditional server, IP, and GPU resources of Web2.

"We are the Web3 infrastructure builders," Miko introduced. "Behind it are the resources of ByteDance and Tencent Cloud. We are their overseas agents, and even the official node lines of Tiktok live broadcasts."

For Maolu Studio, instead of building a cumbersome environment by itself, it is better to buy complete sets of services directly, which not only saves time but also improves success rate. "We are like water, electricity and coal in the mao track. Any industry and track need infrastructure service providers like us to operate." As founder Miko said.

The business acumen in this track are actually "sinking to the bottom", and the "selling water" (test coins) business is also the most direct reflection.

In the past, test coins were mainly distributed for free by project parties for users to conduct test interaction. But today, this link has been highly commercialized and formalized, and the water selling industry has been basically squeezed out by mature products.

Service providers such as gasdotzip and memebridgeb have been able to provide one-stop service purchase of test coins, cross-chain bridge transfer and other services, with mature operations and complete systems.

In addition to this mature "water selling" product, when searching for popular hair-feeding projects on Twitter, you can always see some personal "water selling" tweets, and such messages can also be seen in various WeChat groups. Test coins should be a link in on-chain testing, but nowadays, sometimes it is difficult for us to distinguish the difference between the main network and the test network.

The most typical example is Monad. Although the main network has not yet been launched, there are already a large number of NFT assets on the test network. These assets are extremely widely traded on Magic Eden, and it seems that there is no difference between the real main network assets.

The test coins that give people the first impression of "worthless" are actually an arbitrage opportunity, and opportunities are really everywhere in the currency circle.

This is a new cycle, a new hunting ground and a new law of survival.

There is never a shortage of smart people in the world of hair rubbing. The real difference is not the quality of the environment, but who can complete self-transformation as quickly as possible in the face of change.

In this round of market changes, the project party tightened its airdrops, liquidity turned to trading platforms, and the traditional arbitrage path was constantly compressed. Gone are the era when we could make steady profits by burning gas and brushing interactions. In the new cycle, the ones who can truly survive are often not the fastest runners, but the ones who can see the situation the most clearly and adapt actively.

After all, in the currency circle, survival and evolution have always been the top abilities.