Subscribe to receive an email every time a new post has been published.
All of the round data referenced below can be downloaded from here. The data is part of a project that downloads round data periodically and uploads the csv.
Rough week
It's been a really rough week in crypto. Pretty much across the board, crypto is down around 10 - 20%. This normally wouldn't be that bad, but we weren't exactly coming off all time highs. The week before we were down about 10% as well. And because crypto land moves all together, everything is down.
These downturns are a little disheartening, especially when it coincides with a broader market downturn. It's not much compared to crypto moves, but the S&P500 was down ~2.3% for the week and dropped every day of the week. There was also poor economic news which has strange effects. Obviously if pace of hiring doesn't meet expectations, thats bad for markets. But that could mean a loser money policy, and that's good for markets! But that could lead to inflation and that's... bad? I don't know. I don't think anyone knows. My impression is a lot of the loose money piled into equities and other financial assets which explains why we're up around 30% from pre-covid levels despite, you know, a global pandemic that killed millions and led to lock-downs and businesses going under.
I don't really have a strong position on crypto prices in general. I'm a little disappointed that the "killer app" so far has been NFTs, which aren't very interesting to me. I'm more of a finance guy, so I would like to see more prediction markets like BSC Predict. I would love to see on-chain stock ownership and options/derivatives trading. I would like to see non-custodial methods of giving people access to stable coins (shout out to Reserve doing exactly this). But instead we get jpgs and sleazy game farms.
I don't mean to bash on NFTs. They're not my cup of tea, but I get it. But I hope blockchain tech doesn't stop there. I periodically browse top DeX or defi projects to see if anyone else is doing anything, and its all mostly token exchanges, staking, AMM and now NFTs. But nothing really ambitious sticks out. But I may be wrong or just looking in the wrong places. Email me if you think I'm missing something.
Draws
Something I find incredibly annoying about the PancakeSwap prediction market is how they handle draws. A draw is basically when the lock price (snapshot of price when the round starts) is exactly equal to the close price (the price at the end of the round). In the case of a draw, everyone loses and PancakeSwap takes 100% of the round.
A draw has happened 83 times or 0.2% of the time. But note that the price is quoted as an 11 digit number (e.g. 50027000000 => 500.27). So you'd think that any 11 digits being 100% the same after five minutes would be exceedingly rare, but its really not.
It happened 5 times in the last week (rounds 33460, 33752, 34276, 34623 and 34904), with a sum of 211 BNB or $113k in profit to PancakeSwap, just from the last week. To put that in perspective, the total profit from all other rounds to PancakeSwap was 1,904 BNB, so 11% of their profit came from these rounds that were a draw. I think 3% fee is already pretty high. As I've mentioned in a previous post, PancakeSwap makes a lot of money off the games (around $3.5 million a month), I don't think they need to take the entire draw balance.
Rant over. I may be a little sore because I bet in a few of those rounds and lost due to no fault of my own.
Round sizes
We saw pretty big round sizes this week with 24-hour hitting 40, something we've only seen briefly in December. It's not near all-time highs, but its going in a good direction. No pauses all year which is nice!
We didn't get any crazy round payoffs. Similar to last week, we saw two payoffs > 4, but nothing to write home about. We did see a few large rounds though. Here were the biggest rounds of the week:
| epoch | startTimestamp | start_time | total_amount_eth | |
| 34053 | 34053 | 1641435006 | 2022-01-05 21:10:06 | 104.058673 |
| 34051 | 34051 | 1641434387 | 2022-01-05 20:59:47 | 102.218072 |
| 33982 | 33982 | 1641413070 | 2022-01-05 15:04:30 | 96.057267 |
| 34058 | 34058 | 1641436551 | 2022-01-05 21:35:51 | 95.647933 |
| 34875 | 34875 | 1641688765 | 2022-01-08 19:39:25 | 91.098766 |
| 34057 | 34057 | 1641436242 | 2022-01-05 21:30:42 | 90.445362 |
| 34283 | 34283 | 1641505963 | 2022-01-06 16:52:43 | 89.775021 |
| 34056 | 34056 | 1641435933 | 2022-01-05 21:25:33 | 87.918502 |
| 34357 | 34357 | 1641528841 | 2022-01-06 23:14:01 | 86.106789 |
| 34798 | 34798 | 1641664960 | 2022-01-08 13:02:40 | 84.548156 |
Now lets get to the winners and losers!
Winners and Losers
| Place | account | games played | won | won USD | Winnings Even Money | Average bet size |
| 1 | 0x3e5126c8dd68db20246e51bc31cb087a28003d2e | 203 | 102.32 | 58,140 | 6.95 | 6.02 |
| 2 | 0xeff4fc18c0a067fceb73f23c20c44b249815470b | 817 | 42.46 | 23,940 | 74.37 | 0.49 |
| 3 | 0xae9ddbbb9c6879ef0660ece3ac30d6e21bfdd8ce | 1153 | 40.22 | 22,800 | 57.34 | 0.5 |
| 4 | 0x14e07591eec53d0308675abd0bac602b63243df2 | 136 | 40.03 | 22,800 | 8.85 | 2.32 |
| 5 | 0x43cccda32debcb5863f275e9ab3a80cda301a99b | 617 | 34.55 | 19,950 | 31.99 | 1.19 |
| 6 | 0x7252f0cae79b6075f48a34606b7709fee887c532 | 517 | 33.88 | 19,380 | 35.77 | 0.4 |
| 7 | 0xcbe7f3c18964227c527af457a60a5f1f511dd911 | 307 | 31.93 | 18,240 | 14.98 | 1.63 |
| 8 | 0x77f56855123e2399bc7b3f9e7c647b9c24c2950f | 580 | 31.51 | 18,240 | 59.48 | 0.31 |
| 9 | 0x2b7b2390262f9b70b65f2c3b99987a5cfc268151 | 14 | 23.21 | 13,110 | 7.65 | 3.18 |
| 10 | 0x89c206030df4747e332680f4c1f5bc6fea81f006 | 214 | 21.78 | 12,540 | -2.93 | 2.07 |
Nothing too surprising here. Our whale from last week didn't play again. Although you can see the the algo-bots are making a comeback. #2 and #3 winners were both algo-bots with a respectable 817 and 1,153 games played, respectively. And the average bet size was reasonable at around 0.5 BNB each. Although our #1 was very much a whale with only 311 games under his belt and a respectable win rate.
Lets see how our losers did.
| Place | from | games played | won | won USD | Winnings Even Money | Average bet size |
| 1 | 0x63f5653727c7f23cc4ace5854c69da9d4c888888 | 70 | -177.52 | -101,460 | -5.4 | 17.27 |
| 2 | 0x7032e4fe5926a594fb9015dc26c968661f0a6a9f | 35 | -84.13 | -47,880 | -5.59 | 4.28 |
| 3 | 0x5a9390b08a7d8fb50ea8d51aac5bc39ecfdf2bc2 | 169 | -76.59 | -43,890 | -15.07 | 4.11 |
| 4 | 0xd0dfcd797119b3b2478a6633dfd1acc9cc111311 | 15 | -60.25 | -34,200 | -9.79 | 5.55 |
| 5 | 0xbce32e48e4b5f1ac056d98e51e5d90103d13484e | 101 | -55.23 | -31,350 | -14.8 | 4.1 |
| 6 | 0x09ae05a95454c61123732b438c06257505be1642 | 36 | -47.41 | -26,790 | -6.49 | 7.24 |
| 7 | 0x712fdd09ac64d5776077e2b813fcd1b0431f5278 | 90 | -45.72 | -26,220 | -27.24 | 1.42 |
| 8 | 0x7cab985089c97c4776598217c5aa5f67318e9581 | 231 | -42.99 | -24,510 | -14.75 | 2.72 |
| 9 | 0x0959124002c58961be75d9fcfe0842f92e67ee2b | 283 | -42.26 | -23,940 | 8.56 | 1.51 |
| 10 | 0xd25d6eb44ac320d32b1eb06a67d30a9163a1bf65 | 44 | -40.25 | -22,800 | -7.63 | 3.08 |
Nothing makes me happier than seeing big losses from our #1 loser. It's not his first rodeo, and probably won't be his last. He's played a total of 220 games, with total losses amount to -170 BNB. So basically he was flat coming up to this week, and lost big. He made a brief appearance as a winner on Market Update for week of 2021-11-22 but that's just how it goes
The rest of the losers were pretty much whales, betting large and paying the consequences.
Remember to take profit regularly and never bet more than you're comfortable losing. Invest the time to create and back-test a winning strategy, and start with small bets. Remember that a winning strategy doesn't necessarily stay a winning strategy as you increase the bet size, because the odds move as your bet size increases.
And that's all for this week.
As always, feel free to reach out with questions or comments or want my to highlight anything different on my weekly market recaps. If you like what you read and want to subscribe to receive an email when a new post is published, click here.
Good luck and bet responsibly!