Personal Account: How I Earned the Easiest Money of My Life on EOS

Jun 17, 2025

By: Flash HSL

Original Link: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/fHee5nKN7RQ9OdNo9LgF6w

EOS changed its name to simply “A” — just the letter A. On exchanges, this would place it at the top of alphabetical listings, making EOS first.

I’ve always had a favorable impression of EOS. In the first three months of its ultra-long 350-day ICO fundraising process, I actively participated in both the primary market (the ICO itself) and the secondary market (exchanges), arbitraging between the two and making some easy profits.

That was the easiest money I’ve ever made.

The EOS ICO began on June 26, 2017, and ended on June 1, 2018, raising over $4 billion worth of ETH and distributing 900 million EOS tokens. It was an unprecedented, blockbuster fundraising event.

EOS’s ICO mechanism was quite novel at the time.

The ICO was conducted through a smart contract deployed on Ethereum and had two phases. In the first phase — spanning the first five days (June 26–30, 2017) — 200 million EOS were distributed in one go.

Then came the second phase: a daily auction model. Every ~23 hours, the smart contract accepted ETH contributions and distributed 2 million EOS proportionally based on each participant’s share of total ETH deposited for that round.

This daily issuance continued for 350 days, totaling 700 million EOS. Combined with the initial 200 million, the total reached 900 million EOS, with an additional 100 million reserved for Block.one, the EOS development team — bringing the total supply to 1 billion tokens.

The ICO ended up selling 900 million EOS (ERC-20) tokens and raised 7.2 million ETH, equivalent to around $4.2 billion at the time.

Back then, few in the industry knew how to interact with Ethereum contracts — how to send ETH to them or how to claim purchased tokens.

Tools were primitive. Unlike today’s user-friendly wallets and contract UIs, things were rough.

In 2017, the primary Ethereum wallet was MyEtherWallet (MEW). I liked it a lot. It used JSON key files for private keys. To interact with the EOS ICO contract, you had to manually configure parameters — just a bit more user-friendly than using DOS command lines.

Today’s wallets like MetaMask and imToken have streamlined everything, offering UI-based interaction with smart contracts where you simply click buttons to execute complex operations.

But with MEW back then, you had to import your JSON key file each time, manually select the contract, input the method and parameters, and set your ETH contribution and gas fees — all manually.

And claiming (i.e., calling claim) required filling out several more fields.

Very few people knew how to do this.

I was just curious. I was intrigued by EOS, especially since I had played around with BitShares (the first project by EOS’s creator BM) around 2015. So I seriously studied how EOS’s ICO worked on Ethereum.

During EOS’s 350-day ICO, the token was also tradeable on exchanges. That meant the primary and secondary markets coexisted — but prices weren’t always aligned.

This created a consistent arbitrage opportunity.

Each day, I would deposit ETH into the ICO contract, wait for the round to end, claim EOS tokens, and immediately send them to an exchange to sell.

That was the entire strategy — no hedging, no complex strategy — just betting that the primary market price was lower than the secondary market price. And it worked.

This strategy was profitable for a surprisingly long time. In the first three months, I almost never lost money. In later months, I began to incur occasional losses and eventually quit after half a year.

Why was I confident early on that the primary market would offer a better price? Simply because so few people were participating in the ICO contract.

On-chain data showed that daily participation was under 100 addresses. For most of the first three months, I recall it being consistently 148 addresses. Later, participation increased and profits dwindled.

I also studied blockchain behaviors like network congestion attacks. It was all about making money.

Because each ICO round ended every ~23 hours, you could often calculate the primary market price in the final few minutes of each round (as ETH balances in the contract were transparent). Comparing it to the exchange price revealed arbitrage windows.

So in the last few minutes, large amounts of ETH would flood into the contract, often pushing the primary market price higher.

Sometimes, hackers would deliberately clog the Ethereum network in the final moments by sending gas-intensive transactions, blocking others from participating.

After getting burned once, I learned to max out gas fees whenever I wanted to grab a good slot — very wasteful, but necessary. After losing a few times just to gas wars, I gave up. Let others compete — I had done my part.

That six-month arbitrage stint did earn me some money, but it came with long-term consequences.

Because each round ended every 23 hours, the claim time shifted by an hour daily. That meant roughly one-third of the rounds happened during hours I should’ve been sleeping.

But in pursuit of profit, I ignored sleep. Midnight? 3 a.m.? Didn’t matter — I got up and went to work.

One or two nights of this is fine. But doing it for a week or more is dangerous. And this wasn’t casual sleep loss — it was high-adrenaline. I was either ecstatic or furious after every round.

It wasn’t just my health that suffered. Worse were the effects on my work.

I was leading a small team at the time. But when your teammates see the boss acting like a degenerate every day, nobody else feels motivated.

Looking back, we actually had a good shot at building something with that project. But I wasted the opportunity and dragged my team down. By 2018, several team members left voluntarily.

That experience left me broken. I never again had the courage to lead a team.

Recently, as Elon Musk entered politics, I thought — this may spell trouble for Tesla, X.com, and SpaceX. That’s a loss for the world. When the captain abandons the helm, the ship rarely sails well.

That episode had another side effect.

In 2017, the Bitcoin block size debate was in full swing. I was a hardcore proponent of larger blocks and loved writing articles in support.

Perhaps emboldened by my EOS profits and sleep deprivation, I became arrogant. My writing and group chats became abrasive, and I offended a lot of people.

Eventually, I became the target of online harassment. That experience made me timid online — I lost the courage to speak up.

To this day, I’m still afraid to curse people out online. I’ve become passive.

Two incidents stuck with me.

Once, the RSK team (a Bitcoin sidechain project) was touring China. Since I had written extensively on sidechains, they invited me to speak with them. But on a call, I bluntly criticized their indecision on block size issues. I was arrogant — so stupid.

Worse, I’d stayed up until 3 a.m. the night before doing EOS ICO stuff. I was too exhausted to be polite on that call.

Another time, a journalist called to interview me about the block size debate. I said all sorts of inflammatory things about small-block supporters, then challenged the reporter to publish my exact words. Looking back, had I stuck to technical points, it might’ve been much better.

I had let it all go to my head. In truth, I’ve always been a humble person.

Time flies. It’s been eight years since the EOS ICO. The money is long gone — only the memories remain.

Wu Blockchain

Discussion about this post