Friend.Tech Trading Bot | A Journey into Web3 Trading

The Blockchain Sector @ 2023-08-13

James Bachini

Aug 13

This week I delved into the world of web3 social trading with the launch of Friend.Tech (if you need a invite code try these ft-0suret4c ft-3jbx810w ft-6zn0b9hl)

I’ve just released a blog post and video about how to run a trading bot for the Friend.Tech web3 app. This bot has been open sourced and was not only a fun experiment but also a profitable one, earning a few hundred dollars over the last few days.

Friend.Tech is a web3 social trading game where you can buy shares in your friends and favorite influencers. The more people buy shares in your profile, the higher the price goes up. We took advantage of this system by setting up a trading bot that could execute trades without ever touching the frontend UI.

The code for the trading bot is available on Github. It includes scripts for frontrunning newly created accounts, selling positions, adversarial trading, and more.

One of the key strategies I employed was buying new users. I noticed that new users get bought up pretty early on, and if you got in early, you were paying fractions of a cent for the second share. I then optimized this by doing a balance check and only bidding on users that had more than a certain amount in their wallets.

However, it wasn't all smooth sailing. I faced competition from other bots and even an anti-sniper bot that mimicked new users to clean out the frontrunners. To combat this, I developed the strategies as outlined in the blog post and even created an adversarial trading bot.

In the end, while the trading bot was profitable, earning around 0.2 ETH, I concluded that it wasn't scalable. The margins started to dwindle as I was getting frontrun more often and the platform's early traction began to wane. As an afterthought I ended up with a hundreds of private keys to wallets with dust amounts of ETH on Base and a few thousand transactions through the Friend.Tech protocol so hopefully there will be an airdrop.

The experience was a valuable one, offering insights into the world of web3 and DeFi markets. I hope that the details and code can act as a starting point for others interested in exploring these opportunities.

As always, I advise caution when running arbitrage and trading bots from 3rd parties. Don’t put any funds into something that you don’t fully understand and if it sounds too good to be true it probably is. There are a lot of scams for $800/day bots that ask you to deploy contracts on Remix and have malicious functions encoded in them.