In the wild world of crypto, where projects often pump up their numbers to look more appealing, one trader spotted a golden opportunity and walked away with a cool $5,000 in profits. Shared on X by user @scuptone, this tale is a perfect example of how a simple oversight can lead to someone else cashing in. Let's break it down step by step, explaining the key concepts along the way for those new to the space.

What Happened: The Discovery

About four days ago, the trader noticed something off with the trading pairs for the SOSO token on the SoSoValue platform. SoSoValue is an AI-driven crypto investment research tool, and SOSO is its native utility token used for governance, incentives, and premium features. The trader saw anomalies in the data for two pairs: SOSO/cbBTC (labeled as pair 1) and SOSO/WETH (pair 2).

Upon digging in, it became clear that the project team was artificially inflating trading volume—a practice known as "volume brushing" or wash trading. This is when trades are faked to make a token seem more active and liquid than it really is, often to attract investors or climb rankings on exchanges.

The trader compared the pairs and realized the cbBTC one was more profitable for liquidity providers like themselves. In DeFi (decentralized finance), liquidity providers add funds to pools on platforms like Uniswap, earning a share of the trading fees. These fees are a percentage of each trade— in this case, 0.3% for those pools.

So, the trader jumped in, providing liquidity to the cbBTC pair and raking in about $1,800 per day in fees, courtesy of the project's own brushing activities.

The Chase: Following the Pools

The project team soon realized maintaining two brushed pools was too costly. They pulled out of the cbBTC pair and shifted everything to the WETH pair (pair 2). Not one to miss out, the trader quickly moved their liquidity there, continuing to earn that sweet $1,800 daily.

But the fun didn't last forever. By yesterday afternoon, the team couldn't sustain the losses anymore. They created a new pool (pair 3) with a much lower fee tier—likely 0.01%—which is more suitable for volume brushing since it minimizes the fees paid out. At this point, the trader cashed out, having accumulated around $5,000 in total.

Why was this so lucrative? The project was brushing $1.2 to $1.3 million in daily volume per pool. With a 0.3% fee, that translates to $3,600 to $3,900 in daily fees per pool, a big chunk of which went to liquidity providers.

The Lesson: A Comedy of Errors

The trader speculates this was a rookie mistake by the project's underlings, who didn't understand that for effective volume brushing, you want low-fee pools to keep costs down. Instead, they used high-fee ones, leading to an estimated $20,000 loss for the project before they wised up.

As the trader puts it (translated from the original Chinese post): "No worries—you gained a lesson, and I gained your fees." It's a reminder that in crypto, the world can feel like a "makeshift stage" (a Chinese idiom for things being haphazardly put together), and opportunities arise from others' slip-ups.

This story highlights the importance of understanding DeFi mechanics if you're running a project. For traders, it shows the value of keeping an eye on on-chain data for anomalies. If you're interested in SoSoValue, check out their official site for more on their platform and token.

For more tales from the crypto trenches, stick around at Meme Insider—we're all about unpacking these wild stories to help you navigate the blockchain world smarter.