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What I'm Reading This Week (2025/05.18-05.24)

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Cetus was hacked, but I only made a small profit from shorting CETUS.

The hacker drained the liquidity pool of one side of the pegged token pairs—such as taking all the USDC or SUI—so that others could buy a large amount of tokens at very low prices.

I was this close to sharing a slice of the pie with the hacker.

When the hacker withdrew the USDC and SUI that corresponded to altcoins like Blue, if I had funds on SUI, I could have bought those altcoins at dirt-cheap prices—like getting free chips at a casino—and then sold them on other DEXs at regular prices to make a profit. Unfortunately, most of my funds on SUI were lost due to Splash, so I missed out on the arbitrage opportunity. That was the closest I’ve ever been to a financial comeback in my life—and I let it slip through my fingers.

I also made another mistake: I should have swapped even the small amount of SUI I had left. Back then, I could’ve exchanged it for over 200 Blue tokens—a ~100x return—instead of waiting for a bigger deposit. That was just dumb.

"Hesitating in big moments, and risking everything for small gains."

What I Am Reading

1. Why I Missed Out on the Splash Opportunity​

  • I’ve never seen such an idiotic project team, @splash_xyz—they completely failed my expectations.

  • "After the first effort, strength begins to fade; after the third effort, strength is exhausted."

  • The test token launched on day one, then restarted six days later—killing what could have been a promising golden meme before it had a chance to grow.

  • When they relaunched today, they hid the tokens deployed by players, hoping to create a legendary project. But instead, they destroyed what little trust remained in the community. By the time everything was made public again, players had lost faith. The legend never materialized.

  • That night in the PvP round, I made two mistakes. First, after the launch of the first token, I saw a red candle but didn’t cash out. Second, I didn’t buy Hippo a few days earlier when the app went down.

  • By the next day, only two tokens had launched. The first successful one dropped to one-third of its launch price. There was immediate dumping and fleeing after launch.

  • The test token didn’t launch on time—completely absurd.

2. IBRL: The Alpha I Missed by Skipping the Presale​

  • The presale did a 9x. I got in later and tripled my stack, but sold after just a 40% gain.

  • I knew how the mechanism worked, but I didn’t trust my judgment—maybe I was still lost in the losses from Splash.

  • Gavel is a Solana-based platform for on-chain token distribution and liquidity bootstrapping.

  • The current token launch process suffers from the opacity and high cost of centralized exchanges and market makers, or gets sniped and exploited by malicious MEV on-chain.

  • Users face increased slippage from MEV and issues of information asymmetry and insider trading during token distribution.

  • Gavel offers a transparent, on-chain, and fair fundraising and distribution mechanism.

  • It provides secure, easy-to-manage on-chain liquidity for users.

  • Token lifecycles are fully transparent and auditable.

  • Gavel’s token issuance process has two stages:

    • Stage 1: Users deposit SOL, and after a set time, receive tokens based on the distribution model (e.g., Dutch auction, FCFS at a fixed price, whitelist, etc.).
    • Stage 2: A portion of the tokens and raised funds are injected into Gavel’s anti-sandwich attack AMM for initial liquidity and early price discovery.

  • The anti-sandwich AMM helps protect users from frontrunning and facilitates migration to more efficient platforms (like Phoenix, SolFi, or CEXs).

  • Token issuance parameters must be carefully set according to project goals. Permission is currently required to use Gavel, but participation is permissionless and governed by on-chain smart contracts.

  • $IBRL is a test token to demonstrate the Gavel protocol—it has no real or future utility.

  • All $IBRL tokens and raised SOL are fully used in Gavel's mechanisms. The team retains no allocation.

  • Out of 1 billion $IBRL tokens, 700 million were sold in a 24-hour public sale:

    • Tokens were distributed proportionally among users.
    • 3/7 of the raised SOL, along with the remaining 300 million $IBRL, were injected into the AMM, setting the initial price equal to the public sale's clearing price.

  • The remaining 4/7 of the SOL is used in an exponential decay model to buy back and burn tokens:

    • Every 1000 slots (~6.5 minutes), 0.01% of SOL is used to buy and burn tokens.
    • From day 7 onward, every 2000 slots (~13 minutes), 0.01% of the AMM liquidity is extracted, up to 20,000 times in total, and used to buy and burn tokens.

  • All operations are fully automated by smart contracts and triggered via permissionless cranks.

  • There’s no fee for the initial distribution; AMM trades incur a 30 basis point (0.3%) fee, which goes to Gavel.