How I made $2000 within two hours of actual work.

OST.com (formerly Simple Token) is a toolkit for business to build their own Cryptocurrency without writing smart contracts or other complex software systems. I have been a hodler (holder) of OST tokens for a while and it is one of my favorite crypto projects. I believe that companies that offer real value, like OST does, are the ones to stay in the blockchain world. There are way too many “currency of the future” projects with no real value around.

Nonetheless: OST is still in it’s infancy and the developers have to make sure their systems will work even when bigger customers start using their product. So OST.com started OST KIT⍺ — a rewards program for usage of their alpha product — to help them test the systems. They were planning to give away well over a hundred thousand dollars and they later extended it to around two hundred thousand.

I really liked the Idea of stocking up OST tokens without paying(who wouldn’t). I am also a developer by trade and by using the OST API I expected to stand a chance to become one of the top 10 tokens in the categories that were announced.

Create Token

I like rewards. So the token I created was called Reward Token (or RWD). The great thing about OST is that you can create a token and it’s economy with a simple user interface. No programming was required for this step. All the settings were chosen pretty much randomly. I had no idea what I was doing and how things like token supply and value would influence my chances to gain a reward.

2. Airdrop Tokens

An economy in OST has tokens, users and a company. The company can give tokens to users selectively or airdrop them the tokens. Airdropping means that every user (or every new user) gets a certain amount of tokens. I simply distributed all of my tokens to all of my users. Since I did not create any additional users beforehand those users were just the five or so users that were created by the system.

3. Random transfers

The first version of the script I wrote to perform as many transactions as possible repeated some simple steps indefinitely:

Create a new user . Fetch list of all users . Perform 100 random transfers between random users.

After creating around 400 users I figured the script would get more inefficient with more users and so I removed that step. Every transfer took up to two seconds. Too slow. So I went with:

4. Parallel Execution

If one script could perform 80 transactions per minute, how many transactions could 20 scripts perform? Exactly: 1600 – I did not expect this, but when I ran the same script 20 times using a Linux tool called „screen“ there was no slowdown for every single script. So I was able to maintain a pace of 1600tpm – I even went up to about 4000 when I also ran the script on a second machine. I only did this for a short time though. Unfortunately with so many scripts running I would have to check the balances of the users more often. That was not an option because fetching the users took very long.

5. Sync

To let all scripts know what the global system state was I put every user in some kind of database running in the computers memory called redis. All instances of my script updated the user balances after every transactions. I was now able to maintain a global state that was accessible by all instances of my script extremely quick.

6. Monitoring

I needed to know how many transactions went through my system and I needed to be notified when something went wrong. So I connected my script to a logging service called loggly which generated nice graphs and sent me warnings when something went wrong.

7. More Volume

I was targeting # of transactions at that time, but I wanted more. I also wanted to be on top of the Volume category. My simple solution was to only write users with high balances to redis and do higher volume transactions between them. Simple hack, great effect. In the end I reached 2,953,380 Transactions & 17,453,378 OST⍺ Volume.

Unfortunately phase I ended early. Else I would also have targeted # of users with transactions. The OST community is awesome when you pick the right channel. While the OST forums are a little quiet (I got into top 15 upvotes very easily) the Telegram groups and the unofficial OSTonians group are kind, funny and helpful. Check them out!

Here is the code to my RWD script