Chapter 59
Chapter 59
Black-Haired Investor Awakened as a Superhuman - Chapter 059
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As I entered the office, the black hat hackers greeted me with awkward smiles.
"You're here?"
Like the duffel bag hidden at home, these guys were of a similar ilk.
Things I couldn't even imagine in my previous, grinding daily life, things I never dreamed of.
Shiva exchanged glances with Sword and followed me inside.
Today, Shiva wasn't wearing her usual baggy hoodie and stretched-out jeans, but a neat white blouse and dark blue slim pants.
She looked like a Wall Street intern.
A subtle jasmine scent wafted from the ends of her hair.
I could sense her determination to fully immerse herself in this work.
I turned on the desktop and said, "I think it's a good idea."
Shiva seemed startled by my sudden words and paused for a moment.
"I... I didn't say anything?"
"But it looks like you've already finished the security work?"
"Sword and I stayed up late for a few nights. We cleaned up the main server logs and checked for suspicious traffic. So, in my spare time, I was messing around with this and that..."
Shiva glanced back at Sword, who was standing behind her, and continued.
"Did Sword already tell you?"
"Shiva, you're coding right now, aren't you?"
A quick glance at the few lines of code on the screen was enough.
It was well-organized blockchain logic.
An event listener that detects price changes.
And a module that peeks at transactions in the Mempool.
Just as lawyers refine documents in their own style, code has its own personality. And this was code with Shiva's unique, sharp, and sensitive touch.
As I stared silently, Shiva's face grew increasingly red.
Her inability to speak and the way she swallowed nervously made her look like a student caught doing something wrong.
"It's... it's just for testing."
The reason for Shiva's embarrassment was obvious.
On the surface, the code looked like theft.
It was structured to detect someone trying to buy, buy it first, and then sell it to that person at a higher price.
A way to profit in the middle.
If I had to name it, I'd call it a 'Sandwich'.
Nevertheless.
Since it was happening within the blockchain, it was unclear who the victim was, and it couldn't be definitively deemed illegal under the law.
This kind of behavior isn't necessarily illegal in the stock market either, let alone in the crypto world where only anonymous wallet addresses remain.
So, Shiva was testing the waters in a gray area.
"I wasn't really going to use it. I can explain,"
Shiva followed me, looking frightened.
I sat down in Shiva's seat and began to examine the code.
The structure wasn't complex.
It seemed like only a matter of time before it could be used in practice.
With just a little understanding of blockchain and DeFi, this level of skill is a piece of cake for someone like Shiva.
I could picture this program bot wandering around the blockchain on its own, scraping together money.
Currently, the total deposits in DeFi are around $1 billion.
Daily trading volume is about $100 million.
Assuming that 1% of the total trading volume is vulnerable to Sandwich attacks, and the profit from one Sandwich attack is 0.1% of the transaction amount.
That calculates to roughly $30,000 per month.
Leaving the anxious Sword and Shiva behind, I placed my hands on Shiva's keyboard.
The part that Sword hadn't yet completed.
The function name left blank as a comment at the top caught my eye.
[ checkWindow() ]
The name itself was telling. It was a function to capture the gap between buy and sell orders.
A logic that quickly scans traffic, places a pre-emptive buy order at the price just before a large buy order is detected, and sells at a higher price while the other party's order is being executed.
In an automated routine, this process is completed in the blink of an eye.
I looked at the empty function that Shiva had stopped in the middle of and only added a comment to.
The completion of the logic to reach the target fastest, crossing hundreds of transactions.
Tap. Tap. Taptaptap―
I didn't even touch the mouse.
As the cursor blinked below the comment, my fingers relentlessly filled the empty space.
It was the work of breathing life into this Sandwich Bot.
'Keep the structure simple, because complex is slow.'
Slippage prediction, Gas Fee bidding, and even propagation speed are factored in.
The strings of characters on the screen are completed in succession. The conditional trigger inside the loop takes its place, and finally, exception handling.
Done!
Had it taken about 30 seconds?
I took my hands off and turned to Shiva, saying, "Why are you frozen? I said it was a good idea."
What Shiva was trying to do was something that would inevitably become necessary someday.
* * *
We moved back to my seat.
Before I knew it, Sword was also standing behind me like a spectator.
Shiva began to ramble on with excuses she didn't really need to make.
"I was originally going to go in the direction of automated trading programs. But I don't really know anything about the stock market.
So, I started with the crypto side, which I'm familiar with. DeFi is, well, the data is all laid out and the execution is fast.
It's not bad for testing, is it?"
I already knew her intentions well enough.
It was also a valid reason. In terms of the stock market, Shiva was trying to 'front-run'.
A method of reading another investor's intention to buy in advance and making a preemptive move.
That's exactly what this Sandwich Bot does.
It's not something that can be confirmed as legal, but it's also not illegal, so it's within a gray area.
Even with my legal knowledge, there are no provisions that clearly regulate automated front-running on the blockchain.
Even institutional exchanges don't completely prohibit this kind of behavior.
Regulations are always ambiguous, and interpretation depends on the amount of money involved.
All that remains is the ethical issue.
As the word 'ethics' came to mind, I couldn't help but chuckle.
The things I experienced at Goldman Sachs came to mind.
Was it just Goldman Sachs?
In this industry, ethics is just an excuse to bring up when performance is poor.
As long as you make a profit, no one cares about that word.
In the act of finding out what someone is trying to buy in advance and buying it first, this Sandwich Bot was clearly a program that could be classified as front-running.
"I know your intentions, so don't worry about that. By the way, you don't have $500,000, do you?"
When I asked Shiva, she shook her head with a blank face.
To run this bot properly, you need at least $500,000. The $30,000 monthly profit was a figure that came from that assumption.
And even that $30,000 is just a conservative estimate that doesn't take into account the growth of the DeFi ecosystem.
The blockchain and DeFi markets were just beginning to take root.
There was a new flow of money growing there without censorship or regulation.
But that was just a story about the development of the blockchain ecosystem.
I honestly didn't have any particular feelings about this bot.
I just wanted to see if it would latch onto the newly created transaction gaps in each block and actually bring in the money it earned.
Shiva asked again.
"Why did you ask about $500,000?"
To be exact, I needed 500,000 USDT, a Stable Coin.
No, that much Ethereum.
* * *
After signing up for Coinbase, I deposited $500,000 and exchanged it for USDT.
I then converted that back into 2,368 Ethereum.
Since the Sandwich Bot was going to operate in the Ethereum ecosystem, the reserve had to be Ethereum, of course.
But what was surprising was that the Ethereum I now held in my hands was the first coin I had ever touched in my life.
Unlike how familiar I was with handling it.
The same goes for Bitcoin and Ethereum.
When the Winklevoss twins, who had been kicked out of Facebook, were known to have invested a whopping million dollars in the virtual currency called Bitcoin in 2012.
If I had also taken an interest in virtual currency and studied it, my life would have been quite different.
Ah, Bitcoin―
It was after I had transferred the Ethereum to the Sandwich Bot's wallet as if feeding it.
This time, Sword asked, watching my expression.
"People on Wall Street don't really... I mean. They don't do this kind of thing, do they?"
That's right.
Regardless of age, MetaMask, Gas Fee, and wallet addresses are unfamiliar words to these people.
"That's why it's a land of opportunity."
I was surprised that I said that, but I didn't show it.
Zzzzzzz.
I felt an intense power as all sorts of thoughts rotated in my head in an instant.
"The crypto market will become one of our core businesses."
Shiva and Sword looked at each other as if they understood.
In a brief exchange of glances, Shiva inadvertently raised the corners of her mouth. Sword scratched the bridge of his nose with his finger.
Now I would appear to them as someone who had been studying the crypto market for a long time.
Not only did I know Solidity, the Ethereum EVM language.
Even in the Sandwich Bot setup process.
From the way I handled variables such as the liquidity pool structure of Uniswap, Slippage, and Gas Fee reversal,
The two of them just watched quietly.
Finally.
Click!―
It was the first moment the Sandwich Bot was released into the blockchain world.
The bot began to move on its own like a living creature.
We displayed Etherscan, which allows us to observe transactions in the Ethereum ecosystem, on a large monitor and focused on the bot's movements.
Everything is embedded in the blockchain in a precisely calculated position.
"It's working well!"
"It's coming in!"
With each block that increased, the Ethereum in the bot's wallet was rapidly growing in decimal units.
[ 0.0001 ETH
...
0.0004 ETH ]
But it wasn't just because of the increasing profits, that Ethereum.
I stared at the screen for a long time before I realized.
It was different from what I had only heard and known.
The scale and speed of transactions taking place on Uniswap, this small DeFi platform that was still in its infancy, were beyond what I had expected!
I briefly calculated in my head. The flow of hundreds of millions of dollars that travel through the Ethereum ecosystem every day from all over the world.
And what I realized was that this market was not simply existing, but growing explosively.
People were really pouring money into it without banks or intermediaries.
Given enough time, it would have a huge goal comparable to the existing financial system.
And right now, the basic currency in this DeFi world is only Ethereum.
As this world matures, formal currencies like the dollar will also be used in the form of Stable Coins.
Bitcoin? That's a different area.
There were too many barriers to overcome to establish itself as a real financial infrastructure.
But because it's linked to the dollar, there are already political figures who are paying attention.
They're pretending to ignore it now, but eventually the dollar...
The moment Stable Coins are absorbed into the system will come.
And the company that holds the digital dollar's hegemony will be the next era's PayPal, JP Morgan.
'It's not that far into the future.'
Digital dollar.
In other words, there was already a company that was leading the Stable Coin market.
That was Tether.
Even at this moment, they were supplying dollars to the crypto scene under the name USDT without bank accounts or government approval.
It was slowly eroding the authority of the Federal Reserve.
"Crazy..."
I muttered.
Shiva and Sword looked at me with surprised eyes, but I didn't care.
"A crypto company running a few lines of Smart Contract is taking on the Fed..."
I immediately took out my cell phone.
This kind of contact can never be made through public channels.
Not Wall Street, but Silicon Valley.
While scanning my contacts, the name of Claire Song, a partner at Sequoia Capital, caught my eye.
She was likely to have a connection to Tether.
[ Claire. Do you happen to know anyone at Tether? ]
I need to reach her as soon as possible.
Before the wolves of Wall Street smell it!―