Building a Solana MEV bot from scratch with AI. Documenting every win, loss, and lesson along the way.
When a building passes its final inspection, the inspector signs off on the certificate of occupancy. The plumbing works. The electrical meets code. The fire exits are where they need to be. People mo...
A plumber comes to fix a leaking kitchen faucet. He replaces the washer, turns the water back on, and the faucet stops dripping. Job done. Then the homeowner notices water pooling under the sink cabin...
Every year, publicly traded companies in the United States go through a financial audit. The company's internal accounting team keeps the books — revenue, expenses, assets, liabilities, all tracked in...
Every corporation in America has a corporate seal. It is not a person. It has no fingerprints, no driver's license, no ability to physically walk into a bank and sign a check. But it owns property. It...
Imagine walking into a restaurant with no menu. No sign on the wall. No specials board. No server to explain the options. Just a kitchen window where you shout your order, and the chef either makes so...
Every city has a building code. You don't design the load-bearing walls however you want. You don't wire the electrical panels without following NEC standards. You don't run plumbing without obeying t...
A general contractor doesn't lay bricks, pull wire, or sweat pipe. A general contractor hires an electrician, a plumber, and an HVAC installer — then coordinates them. The general contractor says "wir...
Imagine you're buying a house. In a normal real estate closing, three things happen in sequence: the buyer wires money to escrow, the title transfers from seller to buyer, and escrow releases the fund...
A pilot runs a pre-flight checklist before every takeoff. It doesn't matter if she's flown the same aircraft a thousand times. It doesn't matter if the weather is perfect and the runway is clear and t...
I need to integrate a new DEX program. The first thing I do — the thing any reasonable developer does — is look for documentation. I find the program's GitHub repository. There's a README. It describe...
The transaction fails with error 6002. I know this number. I've decoded it before. I open the program's error enum, count to index two, and read the variant name. It describes an invalid parameter con...
Every swap has a direction. This sounds so obvious that it barely seems worth mentioning. You're trading token A for token B, or token B for token A. Two directions. Same pool. Simple enough. I build ...
Now that PumpSwap is integrated and scanning alongside every other DEX in my pipeline, I'm seeing something I didn't fully appreciate from the outside. The meme coin economy isn't just a sideshow happ...
I've been ignoring an entire category of tokens. Deliberately, consciously, with the confidence of someone who thinks they know what matters. Meme coins — tokens created as jokes, cultural references,...
Every DEX I've integrated so far shares a fundamental assumption: the price of a token is determined by a mathematical formula operating on a pool of reserves. Constant product curves, tick-based conc...
The integration code compiles. The swap simulation runs. The instruction builder produces transactions. Everything looks correct on paper. I submit the first batch of bin-based swap transactions, and ...
The tick-based DEX is integrated and running. Ticks, tick arrays, liquidity that changes at every boundary — all of it now simulates correctly and builds valid swap instructions. Concentrated liquidit...
The constant product AMM I just integrated has one formula. One. I parse the reserves, plug them into x * y = k, apply the fee, and out comes my expected swap output. The math is done in a single pass...
x * y = k. Four characters, one multiplication, one equals sign. The formula fits on a Post-it note. A middle schooler could verify it with a calculator. It is, by any reasonable measure, the simplest...
After the first DEX, I think I have this figured out. I've built the math, parsed the accounts, constructed the instructions, and watched a swap execute on-chain. One DEX down. Five to go. How hard ca...
I'm staring at a raw transaction as a hex dump. Two hundred and forty-six characters of seemingly random letters and numbers. Somewhere inside this blob is a signature, a list of accounts, a set of in...
The screener lights up. A three-hop cycle through a mid-cap token is showing a profit that makes me lean forward in my chair. It's not a small edge — it's a number that, if real, would make the entire...
The math is fixed. Every fee parser is correct. The rounding direction matches what the on-chain programs actually do. Integer ceiling division for fees, floor division for outputs, volatility accumul...
I'm scanning through my codebase at two in the morning, tracing why a profit estimate is coming back wrong. Not catastrophically wrong — just subtly off, by maybe fifteen percent. The kind of discrepa...
I'm staring at a blob of hexadecimal. Two hundred and forty bytes of it, fetched from a Solana account using an RPC call. No labels, no field names, no commas, no brackets. Just a wall of characters: ...
I'm staring at a number that should make me quit....
I'm staring at a Rust compiler error that spans fourteen lines. Something about lifetime annotations and borrowed references. Six months ago, I would have closed the laptop and gone for a walk. Today,...
I know how constant product AMMs work. I can derive the swap output formula in my sleep. Given reserves x and y and an input of delta_x, the output is y * delta_x / (x + delta_x). Clean, deterministic...
Here's something nobody tells you when you start exploring MEV: the chain you pick isn't just a technical preference. It's the single most consequential decision you'll make. It determines the rules o...
I thought I understood MEV. I'd read about front-running, I'd grasped the concept of atomic execution, I'd even started mapping out how blockchain arbitrage differs from the Wall Street version. But u...
I find what looks like a perfect cycle. SOL to USDC through a Meteora DLMM pool, USDC to WBTC through Raydium, WBTC back to SOL through Orca's Whirlpool. The screener detects a 0.5% spread — 500 basis...
There are two gas stations across the street from each other. One charges $3.49 a gallon. The other charges $3.79. If you could somehow buy gas at the cheaper station, instantly teleport it across the...
The code is correct. Every formula checks out. I've verified the constant product derivation, triple-checked the fee subtraction logic, confirmed the reserve lookups are pulling the right accounts. Th...
So I understand the account model now. Everything is an account. Five fields. Programs are stateless, data lives in separate accounts, PDAs give programs control without private keys. Great. Conceptua...
I have a graph. Tokens are nodes. Pools are edges. Profitable arbitrage paths are cycles in this graph — loops that start at SOL, pass through other tokens, and return to SOL with more value than they...
I'm staring at a spreadsheet I just built from my bot's execution log, and something isn't right....
I can compute exact swap outputs now. I can take a pool's reserves, plug in an input amount, and get back the precise number of tokens I'll receive — down to the last decimal. The AMM math is no longe...
I keep reading this sentence in the Solana documentation, and I keep not understanding it: *everything is an account.*...
It's 2:33 in the morning and I'm about to flip the switch....
There's a specific kind of silence that happens when you open a terminal, create a new directory, and stare at it. No files. No structure. No README. Just an empty folder with a blinking cursor, waiti...
I understand x * y = k now. I understand that AMM pools hold reserves of two tokens, that their product stays constant, and that every trade slides along that hyperbolic curve. I can look at a pool's ...
There's a fantasy that floats around crypto Twitter like a persistent urban legend: the MEV bot as a money printer. Set it up, let it run, watch the profits roll in. It's the blockchain equivalent of ...
I know how Solana accounts work. I know how to read them through RPC. I can pull raw bytes off the blockchain and decode them into meaningful data. But here's what I want to understand next: the data ...
I decided to build an arbitrage bot. Great. Then I started reading about how DeFi actually works and immediately hit a wall. DEX, AMM, LP, TVL, slippage — every other sentence has an acronym I don't r...
Imagine you're buying a house. You submit your offer, but before it goes through, someone who has access to the paperwork swoops in, buys the property first, then flips it to you at a higher price — a...