Case studies

You're on your way to leave the office, when you notice a $1.5M transfer to one of the liquidity providers. But what was the source?

Some time ago, Gnosis developed a decentralized trading protocol called DutchX. Over time this protocol was deprecated, and it was later superseded by COW Protocol, which has now processed hundreds of billions in volume. Auctions back then were not so efficient as they are now.

Can you execute a trade on the exchange at block 9462777 in 2020, and turn your 0.1 ETH into at least 4 ETH?

On 19 May 2021 the market fell about 30% in an afternoon. Lending protocols were liquidating positions all day, and most of it was picked clean within seconds by bots. Gas prices reached thousands of gwei.

One position was not liquidated. On Liquity, one user was holding a $1B position, but even with the sharp drop, nothing happened, which led to the user being able to rebalance moments later. Was this too much for bots to process or did nobody notice?

Can you try to process this liquidation at block 12465029 and end with more than 2,500 ETH?

Not many souls know that the TRUMP launch was pretty obvious, thanks to the public nature of the blockchain. Provide the transaction signature of the first attempt to snipe it, as well as the signature that actually made TRUMP trading possible.

VCs move onchain like everyone else. That's why you often like looking at high value transactions flowing into fresh multisigs, token vestings, etc. You never know, maybe you find alpha.

One day you stumble upon 0xAf0970A06BD17AD57f63d633be7f7039EB69Dc95, which looks like an address used in a fundraise, given inflows. While checking out the investors in the raise, you find 0xC29Af06142138F893e3f1C1D11Aa98C3313B8C1f, an address used for a long time by some VC.

Can you identify the name of the protocol that the fundraise was for, and the name of this unknown investor?

You also remember that you saw a fresh address (0xe53ec250fDF41e52d22fEF1f76DeE92A9377AC8f) get $20M from various sources, but you never went deep into it. While looking for clues on the identity of this fundraise, you see inflows from 0x4c2c0F0bB2631B02aC9299C59690914ee7A200B8, an address with billions in volume. Can you identify both the protocol that was funded, and the company behind this huge address?

A new L2 has just gone live: Robinhood Chain, an Arbitrum-style rollup settling to Ethereum. There is a very early token on it you want, CASHCAT. Your friend already sent you the CA which you have in Constants.sol. Issue is, the chain only just started: no public RPC, no bridge front-end, no explorer (well, none that you can find). You cannot send it a transaction directly. The one thing you can reach is the chain's Delayed Inbox.

Can you make your user address hold at least 1,000,000 CASHCAT on the L2?

Uniswap turned on protocol fees last year as part of the "UNIfication". Searchers can burn UNI and "release" the fees to themselves. What's not to like? The hard part is finding a token jar worth your while. Luckily, the accumulated fees on X Layer seem to provide that opportunity...

Can you execute a burn on X Layer and end up with 45,000 USD₮0 in your wallet?

Your wallet has been provided with 2,000 UNI at block 68413600.

Two fault dispute games are created on Ethereum, one for Optimism and one for Ink. Each game has the same root claim: 0xdeadbeefdeadbeefdeadbeefdeadbeefdeadbeefdeadbeefdeadbeefdeadbeef.

This might seem unusual, given it's an invalid claim (right?!), but is actually a frequent sight. Being first to dispute this might make us some money...