I had a bit of a brainstorm earlier today.
Uniswap’s factory contract emits a pairCreated event whenever a new pool is established, so it’s fairly trivial to find the pool and purchase tokens right after the pool is launched, potentially before the project has even announced it. Dark Forest indeed. I’ve been watching a few of these to watch what happens after during these post event launches, and trying to figure out a way to build a bot that can exploit these launches.
Here’s one such transaction.
You can see here that someone is seeding a Uniswap pool with 1 ETH and 441 billion of these KONG tokens.
So a word about KONG. All I can find about it is kongdefi.finance. Just a basic website. No social anywhere, nothing on Twitter other than a single tweet mentioning it, and a reply back to that has failed to garner a response yet.
Anyways, looking at the actual contract log event:
The first Hex value returned is the address of the Uniswap pair, and you can paste it into the Uni search box or into the address bar to find it. Just remove the leading zeroes and add ‘0x’ to it. So you can see the KONG-ETH pair here. You can also watch the chart on DexTools as well.
I did a bit of digging into the contract code and the holders to try and evaluate the likelihood of a rugpull. The contract creator made 1 trillion tokens, burned less than half of them, then deposited about eighty percent of what’s left into the Uni pool with the single ETH. They’re still holding about five percent of the supply. Much of the Uni LP tokens seem to have been put into a token lock contract, but not all of them.
I threw a little bit of ETH at KONG just for kicks, and saw my funds go up about double, so I threw five times that at it, hoping it would do the same, but there was a dump and it’s been chopping around since then. One of the first buyers got in for 0.4ETH and was able to sell less than half the position back for over seven ETH. Not bad for an hours work. They’ve sold another smaller portion off again. What a profit.
I aped into another token again, a few minutes ago, with disastrous results. I basically turned 0.1ETH into 0.003 in about twenty minutes. No website, no Coingecko listing, probably just someone taking advantage of idiots like me, trying to play the DarkForest game.
Some backtesting is going to be needed. There’s probably dozens of LPs created each day, so spraying and praying probably isn’t going to be the best option. These low liquidity pools are probably all scams, so it’s probably best to stay away from them. I’ll have to spend some time looking over the higher value pools and figuring out which projects are quality.
I’ve been brainstorming on how to automate this process. There’s a Uniswap Token Listing bot on Twitter, but I’ve noticed that it’s slow to catch things. There may be a way to do it using Nansen, if I can afford the monthly fee, but I can probably build something myself using Python and Alchemy. Catch the events, figure out what tokens they are, look up Coingecko to find the website, then set an alert if there’s a match. I might even be able to deploy funds if those criteria are met.
More research is needed, but I’ll probably experiment with a few more of these over the next couple days to see if it’s a viable strategy.