Bitcoin is still very strong, so don’t be scared by a few points drop; I’m optimistic about BTC in the long run!

Last night when the announcement from Ronin came out, I thought the market makers in the group would be excited. As it turned out, the one who should have been the most excited sent me a private message at 2 AM with a screenshot—he had cleared half of his market-making position on Pixels.

It's not bearish. He did the math and felt something was off after calculating.

First, let me set the background. This guy started providing liquidity for several games in the Ronin ecosystem at the end of last year, with his main position focused on Pixels, while also placing orders for two small games. By March of this year, the liquidity depth of Pixels had quadrupled, but the slippage had actually increased—can you guess why? Because the trading volume was all driven by farmers' bots, and the real buy orders were as thin as the subway during the morning rush hour. He complained to me: You think you're providing liquidity, but you're actually just paying salaries to the bots.

He did a statistic last month. There are about 110,000 transactions on Pixels every day, with a staggering 41% occurring between 2 AM and 6 AM (UTC+8). Normal people are asleep at this time, so these transactions are either Eastern European bots or scripted. The actual number of new wallet addresses has only increased by 12% in the past three months, while daily active users have increased by 60% — indicating that the same old user is using a dozen accounts to farm.

This is not Pixels' fault. This is the underlying disease of the entire Ronin ecosystem: users are not here to play games; they are here to work. No matter how well your token is designed, as long as the 'earn' in 'play-to-earn' weighs more than the 'play', what you get are workers, not players.

My friend who is a market maker said something that sent chills down my spine: 'After Ronin returns to L2, Pixels' liquidity will increase faster, but my market-making costs will increase even faster — because cross-chain arbitrage bots will flood in from Ethereum and clean up the slippage price differences.'

He wasn't just shooting from the hip. He backtested data from several leading GameFi projects on Arbitrum: whenever L2 narratives land, the trading volume of native projects increases by an average of 150% in the first month, but the net profit of market makers only increased by 20%, with the rest devoured by cross-chain MEV and sandwich attacks.

So he cleared half of his position, it wasn't about running away, it was about freeing up bullets. He bet that after the Ronin L2 launch, there would be one or two 'anti-consensus' outliers in those small games suffocated by Pixels — for example, games where the user duration exceeds 20 minutes, the trading frequency is low, but the average transaction value is high. His exact words were: 'I'm not going to fight for the parking rights; I'm looking for that little alley with only three parking spots, but each spot is filled with a Porsche.'

I asked him which project it was. He didn't say, only replied: 'When Ronin announces the second batch of ecological lists, pay attention to which project's token address has no traces of bots — that's the one.'

This sounds mystical, but I know he never brags. Before Stepn emerged on BSC in 2021, he was the first to notice that the daily active user curve was off — other games had a parabolic curve, while Stepn climbed in a step-like manner, with each step resting on real user growth.

As for who will laugh last on the Ronin ride? Pixels will definitely laugh, but the way of laughing will be different — it has transformed from the protagonist into infrastructure, just like Axie. The ones who truly make big money are always the crafty ones who have already positioned themselves before the announcement comes out.

On the night my friend liquidated his position, he said one last thing: 'Going home? Ronin never left in the first place. You all just thought it was coming back to pick you up, but in fact, it came back to swap for a pair of running shoes.'

The way this was said was convoluted, but I understood it. #pixel $PIXEL @Pixels