The anti-masturbation movement is becoming increasingly intense, yet savvy individuals still earn over ten thousand a month

"Now it's better to farm the trading platforms than the project teams." Arez's farming studio has shifted 80% of its focus to arbitrage on trading platforms this year.

Before the May Day holiday, the information circulating wildly in the group about "registering on Coinbase to receive a 200U airdrop" just happened to confirm this trend of shifting focus.

This cycle is one where farmers are being counter-farmed; most of the small farming studios that have gained nothing have already closed down, and most of the farming KOLs have transitioned to other fields. For example, veteran farming KOLs like Ice Frog have transformed into "project rights protection bloggers."

In this context, Rhythm BlockBeats has noticed that some more perceptive studios have already turned their guns around: some have switched to trading platforms, precisely targeting opportunities in liquidity overflow; some have returned to traditional IPOs, turning the Hong Kong stock market into a new cash machine; and others have quietly started selling water and infrastructure, earning more stable cash flow.

CEX: A New Hunting Ground Under Liquidity Overflow

"Current project teams wish their own people could distribute all the Tokens." Arez said with a wry smile.

In the previous cycle, studios were accustomed to revolving around project teams—farming testnets, airdrops, and community activities. However, with the overall market liquidity tightening, to ensure control after launch while saving limited budgets, project teams generally adopted a strategy of compressing community quotas: airdrop rewards have significantly shrunk, and the proportion of Tokens that retail investors can receive has decreased repeatedly.

The standard black-boxing of testnets and airdrops, along with shrinking rewards, has made it increasingly difficult for ordinary farmers to profit. This change has directly led to the elimination of a large number of small studios, accelerating the internal competition within the farming ecosystem. Faced with the depletion of farming channels from project teams, studios have had to look for new battlefields.

"Projects used to be very profitable, but this cycle is different." Arez lamented, "Now many project teams are actually working for trading platforms and market makers. Where is there still meat to share with outsiders?"

Trading platforms still control the largest pools of capital and active users. Therefore, trading platforms have become the new targets in the eyes of farmers.

To promote new listings, new products, and cultivate user habits, trading platforms continue to spend money, releasing a large number of incentives. Whether it's IDO new listings, trading volume rewards, or volume arbitrage, the liquidity overflow from trading platforms has become a new opportunity. This has also provided new hunting grounds for farming studios.

Wallet IDO New Listings

"We can easily create 200 accounts for each Binance wallet IDO," Arez said. If calculated at a profit of $30 to $50 per account, their team's earnings from one IDO would be equivalent to half a year's salary for a domestic white-collar worker.

Not only Arez, but also Old Zhang's studio has found opportunities in farming on trading platforms.

As early as the Worldcoin period, Old Zhang accumulated a batch of KYC resources and has now smoothly entered various activities on trading platforms.

Typically, studios collaborate with KYC providers, brushing platforms, etc., to form a profit-sharing mechanism: the supply chain provides identity resources, the studio is responsible for bulk operations, and finally, they share the profits from airdrops or new coin arbitrage.

Taking Binance wallet Launchpool as an example, the early-stage dividends were extremely generous, with each account earning nearly $100 from one activity. However, as the number of players surged, the platform continuously raised the thresholds: for example, the trading volume of the wallet within a month, introducing KYC facial recognition, restricting operation times, Alpha points, etc.

Image source: Bit儿瓜

"At first, we mainly used KYC resources from Vietnam and the Philippines, which were relatively low-cost," Old Zhang recalled. However, as Binance wallet new listings introduced more complex facial recognition verification and short-term operations, overseas KYC resources became increasingly difficult to apply on a large scale.

"So now, we basically negotiate KYC resources ourselves and no longer rely on channel providers," Old Zhang said.

Image source: Pump Pump Superman

However, even with more flexible resource allocation, Arez admitted that as the thresholds continue to rise and the oversubscription multiples hit new highs, the preparation and costs required to farm a Launchpool have also increased significantly.

"It's getting competitive now; there are too many monks and too little porridge, as profits are decreasing with each round," he said. Therefore, studios are constantly looking for new opportunities and no longer solely relying on IDO new listings.

"Whatever the platform promotes, we farm it."

"The reward logic of trading platforms is essentially buying data with money," Arez summarized.

In addition to IDO new listings, trading platforms often launch various trading rewards or airdrop activities to promote new products. These are usually concentrated in the early stages of new product launches, requiring users to complete a certain trading volume or deposit amount, with generous and rapid rewards.

"The reasoning is quite simple: wherever the platform lacks trading volume, there will be the largest activity subsidies." Arez told Rhythm BlockBeats that they have dedicated personnel monitoring the announcements of major trading platforms, quickly capturing any opportunities.

To accurately hit the big rewards, Arez has spent a lot of time studying the strategic styles of various trading platforms. He likens the competitive landscape of trading platforms to the fragmented power struggles of the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods.

"Each platform is like a feudal state; the national conditions differ, and the strategies vary. Our task is to find our opportunities in these small wars," Arez said with a smile, citing an example frequently mentioned within the team: "When Shang Yang implemented reforms, he had to establish rewards and punishments. He offered ten gold to anyone who could carry this log to the north gate. Because no one went, the reward kept increasing until it reached fifty gold, and then someone went and claimed the reward."

In his view: Coinbase's recent generous launch of a 200U registration airdrop is precisely to support its contract trading sector, addressing long-standing shortcomings; Bybit is vigorously promoting its payment card function, accompanied by a series of cashback activities; and Gate is pushing some new meme functions… "The reasoning is the same; it's essentially like the Qin state offering ten gold for reforms today and the Zhao state offering five gold for reforms tomorrow."

"My goal is to be the first person to carry the log," Arez said. In the new round of competition among trading platforms, he prefers to be the first to test the waters and eat the meat first: "Whatever the platform promotes, you farm it; follow the platform to eat the meat."

As project teams' airdrops have devolved into black-box games, trading platforms have become the new "money-spraying main force" of this cycle: from Binance Launchpool's IDO to Coinbase's contract trading with real money, to Bybit's payment card traffic competition, perceptive studios have already turned their guns around. In the liquidity overflow of these trading platforms, perceptive studios have once again found their way to survival.

One Fish, Multiple Meals: Low-Risk Arbitrage + Farming Airdrops

In addition to participating in activities and IDO new listings, some more specialized studios have already explored a dual revenue model of arbitrage + farming airdrops on trading platforms. Backpack trading platform is a typical case.

Here, we also strongly recommend the interview article released by Cookie last week—"Backpack + AI, even code novices can script low-risk profits." The article interviewed a high-level player, CJ, who does arbitrage scripts on the Backpack platform, sharing many practical techniques and ideas that can be directly used:

For example, using multiple strategies in combination, such as buying SOL in the spot market while shorting SOL in the futures market, then transferring the spot to the chain to participate in liquidity pools (LP Farming) to earn fees, while also stacking airdrop expectations from different platforms to achieve multiple gains; or conversing with AI assistants (like Cursor) to continuously refine and optimize logic, ultimately building a set of automated trading and interaction script systems, significantly improving the efficiency of arbitrage and farming airdrops.

On trading platforms with liquidity overflow, trading arbitrage while farming airdrops has become an important weapon for the new generation of studios. Especially platforms like Backpack, which have both token issuance expectations and support for multi-strategy arbitrage, have become a battleground for farming studios.

Hong Kong Stocks "Small Spring," Studios Return to Old Business

In addition to seeking opportunities in liquidity overflow on trading platforms, some quicker-reacting farming studios have also turned their attention to IPOs in the Hong Kong stock market.

"Since it's hard to farm in the crypto space, why not look for meat in the traditional market?" Arez told Rhythm BlockBeats, this year their studio has specifically set up a small team for Hong Kong stock IPOs, dedicated to handling IPO subscription projects. Since the second half of 2024, Hong Kong stock IPOs have performed exceptionally well, ushering in a "small spring" market, which has become a new source of cash flow for many farming studios.

Among these new stocks, Mixue Ice City and Mao Ge Ping have performed particularly well: Mixue Ice City surged over 47% on its first day of listing, with a net profit of nearly 10,000 HKD for a single lot. Mao Ge Ping, a well-known high-end beauty brand, saw a first-day increase of nearly 58% after listing, with a single account only needing 2880 HKD in principal to subscribe for 10 lots, ultimately yielding an average profit of over 16,000 HKD per account.

"When it comes to Hong Kong stock IPOs, I look at a few points: good fundamentals, high market heat, large-cap stocks, low issuance valuation, and high subscription multiples. The win rate can be over 70%." Arez stated that their current win rate and certainty in Hong Kong stock IPOs far exceed those in the crypto space.

In the crypto space, the airdrop standards set by project teams have also completely become "black-boxed," with most projects no longer publicly disclosing any standards, and even directly manipulating lists in the backend: the proportion of self-retained addresses has significantly increased; standards are vague, and scoring systems have become privatized, leaving ordinary farmers with almost no predictability; the success rate of "sipping soup behind project teams" has plummeted. Some resource-based studios leverage private relationships with project teams: project teams directly allocate airdrop standards to partners; studios produce interaction addresses in bulk as agreed, ensuring interaction data meets standards; after airdrops are distributed, profits are shared proportionally. But clearly, such opportunities only belong to a few players with resources and connections, while ordinary studios are largely excluded.

In contrast, Hong Kong stock IPOs seem to be purely advantageous.

At the same time, just like the competition between trading platforms in the crypto space, Hong Kong brokers are also aggressively competing for clients: brokers like Yao Cai, Hua Sheng, and Tiger have launched "commission-free" promotions, along with stock giveaways for transferring accounts; some brokers offer 100 shares of Tencent Holdings, while others give away Warren Buffett's major holdings in Occidental Petroleum…

Thus, the financing leverage provided by brokers for IPOs has also increased: "In the past, brokers offered leverage of 10 times, with a few brokers able to provide 20 or 30 times, but since the second half of last year, brokers have been able to offer leverage of 50 times or even 100 times," Arez said.

(Note: 10 times financing leverage means that the single account's IPO cost is compressed to 1/10 of the original.)

Selling "Water," Renting Servers, Earning Money from Farmers

Where there are many "farming players," there are businesses to be made in farming.

As project teams tighten their audits on IP sources and interaction environments, using rampant IPs (commonly known as "thousand-person riding IPs") for farming is no longer realistic. Domestic IPs are frequently blocked by project teams, and overseas IPs have become a hard requirement for some projects' interactions; multi-account operations require a large number of independent IPs to prevent account bans; node-type and挂机类 projects (like Nillion, Grass, etc.) have extremely high requirements for server stability and IP purity.

Thus, professional server and IP suppliers have emerged.

A typical server IP supplier's service process includes: providing overseas cloud servers (such as ByteDance's Volcano Engine, AWS, Hetzner, Tencent Cloud international version, etc.); configuring stable independent IPs; pre-installing the basic environment needed for interaction (system, wallet, scripts, toolkits, etc.); some high-end services even offer node optimization, traffic distribution, and script deployment custom solutions.

Byteplus.Pro is engaged in such business; since the Grass project, Byteplus.Pro's founder Miko has noticed this small windfall, bringing traditional Web2 servers, IPs, and GPU resources into the Web3 business.

"We are Web3 infrastructure providers," Miko introduced, "backed by resources from major companies like ByteDance and Tencent Cloud. We are their overseas agents, even having the official node lines for TikTok live streaming."

For farming studios, rather than building cumbersome environments themselves, it's better to directly purchase a complete set of services, saving time and increasing success rates. "We are like the water, electricity, and coal in the farming track; any industry and track needs infrastructure service providers like us to operate," as the founder Miko said.

The business-minded experts in this track have also "sunk down," with the "selling water" (test coins) business being the most direct manifestation.

In the past, test coins were mainly distributed for free by project teams for users to conduct testing interactions. However, today, this segment has been highly commercialized and formalized, and the selling water industry has basically been squeezed out by mature products.

For example, service providers like gasdotzip and memebridgeb can now offer one-stop services for purchasing test coins, cross-chain bridge transfers, etc., with mature operations and complete systems.

In addition to these mature "selling water" products, when searching for popular farming projects on Twitter, one can often see personal "selling water" tweets, and such messages frequently appear in various WeChat groups. Test coins should be part of on-chain testing, but nowadays, it has become increasingly difficult to distinguish between mainnet and testnet.

The most typical example is Monad; although the mainnet has not yet launched, there are already a large number of NFT assets on the testnet, which are widely traded on Magic Eden, appearing almost indistinguishable from real mainnet assets.

What initially seems "worthless" as test coins is actually an arbitrage opportunity; opportunities in the crypto space are truly everywhere.

This is a new cycle, a new hunting ground, and new survival rules.

The world of farming has never lacked smart people. The real difference lies not in the quality of the environment but in who can adapt to changes the fastest.

In this round of market changes, project teams have tightened airdrops, liquidity has shifted to trading platforms, and traditional arbitrage paths have been continuously compressed. The era when one could easily profit from airdrops by burning gas and brushing interactions is long gone. In the new cycle, those who can truly survive are often not the fastest runners but those who can see the situation clearly and adapt proactively.

After all, in the crypto space, survival and evolution have always been the top abilities.