BAX BOTs Finally Deliver!!!

A long time ago in a far away land I was learning about this crypto stuff and listening to the Cryptnation weekly VIP meetings.  PizzaMind (one of the founders of Cryptnation) found this small cap crypto called BAX.  I didn’t know much about it, but it looked promising, so I did my usual throwing of $100 or so at it and held.

I held through the bear market when the value went well below $10. The whole time I just ignored this little BAX investment not ever knowing if it would pan out.

Then Kucoin listed it and my fun started.  I transferred about ⅓ of my BAX into Kucoin and started botting.  At the time, my transferred amount was still only worth $50 or so.  The total investment was well over the original $100–this is because, when Kucoin listed it, the market opened up and more participants were able to be involved.  More folks wanted to own BAX and the BAX price went up.

But I didn’t care about any of that.

My goal all the time wasn’t to hold and sell, my goal was to ride up and down the USDT / BTC relationship by botting the heck out of it.

Before I get into that though, a general update on some of my other positions.

Liquidity Mining

As I mentioned before, I have assets in many DEFI networks and they don’t have a USD cost. In fact, they weren’t even purchased with USDT.  I did something as an experiment and I have no idea if it will work – but hey, why not try, right?

Since I was early to the game and I knew there was going to be a DEFI explosion, I had some AVAX, ONE, FTM, MATIC, ATOM, KCC, and other network core coins.

Instead of selling at a high and buying back in, I chose to invest in each DEFI landscape by transferring some of my core coins to their proper networks.  These are the coins that I used to buy assets in each ecosystem.

I could be wrong, but I suspect that over a long time this may pay off as the core asset appreciates and the sub assets start getting picked up by exchanges, causing their prices to go up.  Perhaps some will die too…

I took those assets purchased with the core network coin and joined them together in LP (Liquidity Provider) tokens and staked as many as I could.  This is my attempt at gaining more quantities of coins over time before these assets make it big.

At some point, some of these assets will be ready for me to start botting, and when they are ready I’ll have more of them than when I started.  Perhaps they’ll be worth more USDT or perhaps not – I don’t really care since my cost was measured in the core network coin of the ecosystem I’m in and when I eventually sell for a profit I’ll be selling back to the core network coin making the gain not in USDT or USD.

Yield Farming

This is a pain in my neck – like seriously…  My shotgun approach wasn’t wise here as there are at least 100 different projects with my assets deposited and earning yield.  This may work out in the long run, but right now it’s a hot mess trying to maintain things.  And the reward isn’t great for most of these positions.

So, every month or so I go through one network at a time and claim / harvest and re-stake whatever I can.  I’ve failed in my monitoring strategies, so I just have to leave them there until their quantity grows.  That concept is still on my desk as I’m keenly aware that this year and next will allow for more assets to cycle through exchanges and perhaps be good for botting!

You never know if any of these assets I’m yield farming with are going to be good for botting eventually.

TIME Wonderland

I have participated in many crypto things that I consider to be foolish – not really to make money or earn anything, but more to watch what happens.  I feel if I have skin in the game I’m able to gather more info.

TIME is one of those things that I started into without even thinking about it.  I sunk my $100 early on and was able to remove that $100 already so my investment now is de-risked.

So I sit, waiting for this TIME to do something magical.  The TIME price is set by many market conditions, but at this point the quantity of TIME that I own increases by nearly 10% every 5 days.  So that means that in just less than 50 days I will have 2X the TIME that I have now.

The concept of this project is incredibly complex, so much so that it’s hard for me to wrap my head around and nearly impossible for me to explain without writing a dissertation and who wants to read that… LOL.

In general, TIME is a fork of OHM and both are very interesting projects.  They are part of a new type of crypto, a reserve backed stable coin.  This type of stable coin does not maintain a stable price, so it’s hard to explain what it is for real.

Anyhow, over the holidays I minted my first TIME.  Minting is the process of supplying crypto assets to back the stable coin and in return I receive a discounted portion of that stable coin.  I had no idea what I was doing, but a couple clicks and 5 days after I made the last of those clicks I had brand new TIME ready to stake.  I gained about 5% more TIME for my waiting – so my buying power went a little farther, though not much.

Bot Maintenance

I finally have a routine!  Let me tell you, without a routine it’s not fun maintaining quoteless bots.  It’s also not fun maintaining multiple platforms: some work on my phone, others only a desktop, ugh.

In general, I check on all the bots once when I wake up and once before I go to sleep. But if I’m close to my computer or phone and have a down moment I’ll pop in to see how things are going.

I’ve gotten back into monitoring performance of the bots because truly, the performance stats I see from each platform don’t help.  My goals are to stack ETH, BTC, and USDT.  I’m calculating how much each bot gains daily and kicking out the lowest delivering bot, then measuring again in a few days and repeating until I get bots that I can be proud of that are delivering me larger catches each day.

Of course the other way to grow the amount of gain I receive is by investing more in the assets as they hit the button of their trading ranges – but that’s not something I want to do at this point since the market takes talent to dig and find good buys.  I don’t have that time, talent or idle capital to seek bigger bags.  But I do know that my bags should double this next year no matter what I do based on market conditions.  Though some bags may go to zero – it just won’t be the ones I care about.

The assets I own are key to the success of many crypto threads in 2022 and just keeping them (HODLing) should allow for them to appreciate against BTC, ETH, and USDT.  This appreciation should allow my bots to be worth more and their gain percentages will be the same. However, the quantity of gained tokens will be higher if the value being traded is higher.

Independant Appreciation

I have to admit that I think I made up this concept. Since I’m not a classically trained trader I have no idea what the proper terms are for things.

Early on in my discovery of crypto I found that exchanges had different prices and I used that to my advantage.  More recently I learned that this concept has a name: Arbitrage.  This is kinda common sense to most I know in the trading community.

When an altcoin is born it has very little connective tissue to maintain correlation.  Correlation is another of those fancy words that I learned meaning that if one asset tends to move inline with another asset they are seen as correlated.

Altcoins have their own trajectory, their own price discovery, and they make their own way through the cryptosphere.  There is some truth to well established altcoins moving in tandem with other larger assets in the marketplace but I’m talking about the first stages of an Altcoin.

There are a few stages every altcoin goes through from it’s conception to success.  Not every asset goes through these stages and not always in this order, but with 10,000+ altcoins out there it’s safe to say the below represents a typical progression. However they are important because with each stage the asset price tends to appreciate many multiples.

Incubation

Usually when the asset comes out they are hard to buy because you have to buy from the project directly.  This is what I call the incubation period and is really the best time to acquire an asset as it’s the lowest price it should ever be.  Say the asset starts as being worth 0.000001 USDT per coin and we buy 10 USDT worth.  That means that we own 10,000,000 of these coins.

Testing

Then a testnet or some basic utility comes out to make sure the coding works. This announcement usually reaches a wider audience and encourages more buyers.  Plus the project probably cleaned up it’s buying process but still you can only buy through the project directly in most cases.

Lately, decentralized exchanges have been carrying assets far earlier in their development cycle.  So perhaps by this point it is a little easier to buy (on a DEX), while also being nowhere near the price it will be later on (if the asset succeeds.)

These markets are fairly illiquid and have many inefficiencies that can be exploited. But what usually happens for coins that are less than 0.001 USDT is they appreciate by multiples.  Some are now calling it “eating zeros.”

Let’s say the price went up to 0.00001. This means that our 10,000,000 coins that we spent 10 USDT on are now worth 100 USDT.  Though don’t get excited because you can’t sell them all at once as you’ll probably crash that market or at the least there won’t be enough buyers who know about and want this asset yet so your sell price will fluctuate a lot – this is called slippage.

Production

Then, as if some magic lever is pulled, an announcement and production push happens and the asset should appreciate quite a bit.  This is when the reason for the asset starts and the real project is begun.  By this point it should be easy to sell a small portion of the initial investment and de-risk the bag and take a profit too if you want.  That’s when my fun begins.  Once the bag has a zero cost basis because at that point it’s all “house money.”

Price tends to appreciate another set of multiples – say it hits  0.0001 – that puts our 10 USDT investment at a value of 1000 USDT.

I did this on 300+ assets and I’m sitting on them, waiting for the successes to appreciate – most will be failures, but those few that succeed should surprise me later on with enough gain to make up for the global losses.  Plus being a HODLer I don’t need to worry about selling an underperforming bag, so if these assets take a 90% nosedive then resurrect themselves I’ll be right there to pick up where I left off.

Exchange Listings

Then come the real exchange listings like Kucoin, Binance, etc…  When those exchanges pick up, the price tends to appreciate quickly as many more are able to buy it easily now especially if the project does good things, has a wide audience, or is able to provide value to the holders.

This is the last natural appreciation as each of these stages gradually increase the audience and therefore entice more folks to buy in.  Once an asset is listed on an exchange it becomes a battle to survive with the other thousands of assets on the exchanges. This means that the other dozen or so projects in the space will compete against the utility of the asset.

This is when my Botting can take a life of its own.  Each new altcoin has their own unique progress – some make it, but most don’t.  At any point above, if there is staking on an asset I own I do it. At any point above when there is a possibility of establishing a BOT or doing liquidity mining, I do it…

Now the fun stuff, BAX

I’ve had a full cycle on many coins, the most recent is BAX.

Early on I took 30% of my portfolio value and decided I was going to get risky.  I kinda just bought a small bit of everything I heard of as I was hearing of it.  BAX was one of these.  Many told me it was a dead project – but why would I go through the effort to sell an asset that wasn’t yet through it’s production stage?  Remember, my investment was equivalent to buying a meal for my family.  These are relatively small dollars especially when it was worth less then the cost of a six pack during the bear market.

Fast forward and it did get listed on Kucoin (Yay) – this allowed me to make some bots – which didn’t do jack for a very long time.  Trading was flat and sideways without much volume.  Folks were harping on me to let go of this “looser” but I held to my strategy and dug in, transferring more of my BAX and placing bots on BAX/ETH | BAX/BTC | and BAX/USDT.

I started poking around their community and realized that there was a lot of passion, mostly in the form of anger, but passion, engagement, and community is a positive sign for a crypto project.  So I kept it and kept the bots running because I knew there was a chance that this project would succeed and by now my small de-risked bag was worth more than 400 USDT.  I had sold off nearly ⅓ of the BAX to recover my investment but still a 400 USDT bot gained enough to keep it running.

Then BAM, overnight BAX got a banking charter in England and the price shot through the roof.  My bots turned on in a massive influx up and I was able to see my theory in action.

One thing I was curious about early on was the difference between when a smaller coin like BAX is appreciating versus a large coin like BTC appreciating.  With each inch up on BAX the percentage gain was far greater than with each mile up BTC made.  The funny thing this does is run up BAX against BTC, meaning that my BAX bag was worth so much more BTC or ETH than it was worth in USDT.  This is why I believe botting with assets that start out sub 0.001 USDT gives the best results.

The BAX check in

So, here I am, having run the BAX bots through several large impulses and it’s settled now into a new trading range.  It could go sideways for another several years, or worse down.  I’m well into the green and playing with house money so I don’t much care.  The bots are in Bitsgap and they release profit as it accumulates.  So, this past week or so I’ve chuckled every time I go into Kucoin and notice new profits.

I’ve learned the hard way that I have to pull profits out in order to realize gains and the way Kucoin is built it has a natural mechanism for this.  The “Main” Kucoin account holds assets that you want to withdraw – I’ve taken to using this to store my newly created USDT, ETH, and BTC.

Bitsgap locks up the assets in their bots so I can be certain that the bots will continue performing and I don’t trade or do anything else with BTC, ETH, or USDT. In fact, I don’t put any new BTC, ETH, or USDT into Kucoin, I only pull them off…

I did pretty well for myself, here are a couple bots I closed off already.  I have since restarted them, but BAX isn’t delivering much anymore, onto the next… QI I believe…

I have 20 Bitsgap bots running, 10 Kucoin bots, and about 15 Pionex bots.  They all are working for me rather than me working for a dollar.

So, as I log into Kucoin on my phone, I see new BTC, USDT, and ETH in my trading account not locked up – I just transfer that into the main Kucoin account and accumulate.  Now it’s time to expand!

I can tell things are working because the Trading account gains new currencies and I transfer them to the Main account.  I chuckle each time I’ve been doing this over the past few weeks. 

I’ve been chuckling a lot.