Date: 2022-05-08

In this analysis want to find out wether the 'bot tax' developed by Metaplex works or not.

All data is from between April 29th 2022 and May 8th.

This question I was not able to answer with pure data, but I found out which collections where minted at these days and hours.

Overview

What is Metaplex and its Candy Machine?

The Metaplex platform, which combine a decentralized protocol and an open source framework, allows everyone to launch their own NFT collection including a storefront. Candy Machine is their fully on-chain generative NFT distribution program for the Solana Blockchain.

What is 'botting penalty'?

'Botting penalty' is the solution developed by Metaplex to charge (and prevent) bots for botting Metraplex / Candy machine and which was implemented on April 29th. Each bot mint request is charged by 0.01 $SOL.

Methods

• queried and filtered solana.fact_transactions
• matched it with solana.fact_nft_mints
• timeframe 2022-04-29 - 2022-05-08
• manual research on NFT collections minted on 'peak days'

Analysis

Does 'botting penalty' work?

The chart above shows the through the bot charged transactions in numbers and amount per day. It is clearly visible that bots were very active and May 1st and May 6th.

The answer to the initial question is: Yes, the botting penalty works!

In numbers this means around 52k penalties were enforced and Metaplex earn around 517 $SOL with it.

This chart shows the penalty bot activity on a hourly basis. Peeks are:

• May 1st, 01:00 and 02:00 AM
• May 6st, 05:00 till 07:00 PM

Which collections were the bots targeting?

The next chart shows the Top 10 wallets charged for botting. We see some wallets were heavily active and had to pay high penalties!

The #1 most active (bot) wallet had to pay a penalty of 0.01 $SOL for 3783 attempts, that is around 38 $SOL! May be still too cheap ;-)

1. On 2022-05-01 it was AMIGUS with a mint price of 1.50847032 $SOL
2. On 2022-05-06 it was MOUS IN DA HOUS (1.00847032 $SOL) and Rejected Bears (0.08847032 $SOL)

Conclusion

• Metaplex botting penalty works!
• Metaplex earned around 517 $SOL with 'bot taxes' so far!
• Bots only go for specific NFT mints!
• Around 52k transactions were discovered to be guilty of botting the network!
• 8.71k bot wallets could be identified!
• AMIGUS, Rejected Bears and MOUS IN DA HOUS seem to be popular collections

8.71k bot wallets could be identified!

Thanks for reading!

This analysis was created on 2022–05–08 for a bounty at Flipside Crypto by piper to answer the following questions:

Solana - Metaplex Bot Free: Q72. Solana experienced another network downtime due to intense botting of a NFT mint. Solana has been working on a creative solution to deal with this botting issue called Quic, but Metaplex, the infrastructure protocol for Solana NFTs decided to implement a ""bot tax"" to help alleviate this issue.

All data used are from Flipside Crypto. Flipside Crypto