There are only two types of people participating in trading competitions in the square—either shills working with the market makers to unload positions; or studios using project funds to manipulate data. Do you really think you can earn rewards this way? The profits are minimal, the numbers don’t add up at all, and yet people still risk their lives to join.

Let’s do some careful calculations.

Taking recent tokens as examples, here’s the reward distribution for $RAVE $ZKP $CYS: RAVE, calculated at a token price of 0.34U and 67 tokens, yields about 22.78U; ZKP, at 0.12U per token and 185 tokens, about 22.2U; CYS, at 0.39U times 70 tokens, totals 27.3U. Looks like a decent amount, right? But then look at the trading volume, and you’ll be dumbfounded.

Alpha’s limited order rewards are four times, meaning you need to刷16 times the trading volume. RAVE needs a trading volume of 151,000 to earn that reward, but the actual成交 is only 9,400; ZKP is even more exaggerated, with a target of 274,000, but only 9,400成交; CYS also needs 14,400, but only 7,200成交.

The key issue is slippage cost. The candlestick charts of these tokens are extremely chaotic, with severe price swings. It’s common for a single transaction to eat up 1U. My personal experience is splitting orders into 200U chunks to keep slippage within 0.1U—this is already at the extreme limit.

What about the real costs? For RAVE, 9,400手, divided into 200U per order, requires 47 orders, with total slippage of 4.7U. ZKP, with 17,000手, 85 orders, costs 8.5U. CYS, with 14,400手, 72 orders, costs 7.2U.

The final tally looks like this: RAVE 22.78 minus 4.7 equals 18.08U; ZKP 22.2 minus 8.5 equals 13.7U; CYS 27.3 minus 7.2 equals 20.1U. Sounds okay? But the problem is—this is under ideal conditions.

How deep are the pitfalls in reality?

First, most people simply cannot maintain a slippage of 0.1U per order consistently. The few time windows available for刷 are limited; if a few orders go wrong, profits vanish instantly. Second, you can only place buy and sell orders below the market price, which is a guaranteed way to lose money. Want to wait a few days to sell at a higher price? Want to do swing trading? Just look at the candlestick charts and despair—this isn’t knife-edge trading, it’s suicide. A slip-up or unexpected market volatility can lead to huge losses in minutes.

There’s also an invisible cost—time. Unless you have some black tech studio automation (which, if you really had that tech, you wouldn’t be in crypto earning this little), normal people need to monitor the market manually, which can’t be done in just ten or fifteen minutes. The psychological toll of spending one or two hours daily is unavoidable; calculating opportunity costs, it’s over a hundred dollars a day. Over five days of work, you’d earn more delivering food, with much lower risk.

Bottom line: if you’re still participating in these trading competitions, there are only two possibilities—either you have professional-level skills, or you’re a few cards short of a full deck. I’m not joking.