Market never sleeps...
From the outside people only see the final results and not the countless hours that go behind understanding the market. Sometimes you win and sometimes you lose, but it really hurts losing, especially in such way.
What happened?
It was the 26th of December, the day after Christmas, and I was in voice chat with some friends. We were preparing for this $LONK token drop on the NEAR blockchain, which at the time wasn't that good of a chain. The hype around the token was unreal tho, so it was worth a shot. Given that the chain wasn't used that much, i tried to find an edge over others. Just minutes later, i figured out that the DEX on which the token was going to drop had a TypeScript SDK, so i quickly figured out how to build a monitor for it, since they announced the day, but not the drop time. After the monitor had been running for a bit, i went to the kitchen for a few minutes to grab something to eat, and when i came back, my heart dropped.
The monitor actually worked and it pinged the real token address at 15:53:44 to be exact. You want to know when the first buy transaction with significant size was sent?
15:55:22, exactly 1 minute and 38 seconds after i received the notification on my discord. I had 98 seconds to perform a simple swap on a dex. Everything was ready. I just had to input the token address and click swap. And how much would i have bought?
I had deposited 250 NEAR tokens a few hours before the drop, so i would've bought with 10x the size of the other guy (and also earlier than him, meaning buying at a better price). This guy ended up buying almost 20% of the supply, meaning that with my size i could've easily bought a huge % of supply to then dump on retail, since all the other traders started buying after their tweet at 15:57
https://x.com/Lonkonnear/status/1739661637626532237
Main takeaways
Goes without saying that given the hype the price skyrocketed and the first buyer walked away with insane profits, probably around low six figures. That could've been me with even higher profits given the potential higher buy size. But it wasn't me, so enough hypotheticals. Understanding the tech behind every project is fundamental to have an advantage in buying early, that's what I focus on at yyds capital. The market doesn't owe you anything and it will never do. You just need to charge it to the game and keep going. Can't win them all. (It was for sure an expensive snack break :/)