On October 31st, 2024 at 4pm UTC, the second Omni trading competition officially came to an end after a week of testnet trading. This article describes how the second trading competition went, and dives into observations about some of the strategies used by the winners.

Highlights

• 18,047 peak daily active traders (up from 1,303 in first competition)

• 50,754 total competitors (up from 1,948 in first competition)

• 631.8M total Test USDC claimed from faucet (up from 99.5M in first competition)

• 227,968 orders placed

How Did It Work?

The competition was open to all users (except Restricted Persons) and took place on the Omni testnet. At the beginning of the competition, all user positions and Test USDC balances were wiped. Users could claim 10K Test USDC daily from the faucet, which could then be used to trade and generate profits (or losses) on Omni. The competition was tracked through a leaderboard in the Variational Docs, which was updated daily to show a ranking of competitors by PnLs. The leaderboard page has now been archived, but is still available to view.

Who Won?

There were 5 winners who split a prize pool of 2,000 USDC, 100 winners who received a top 100 NFT, and 3,617 users who claimed from the faucet more than three times and received a participation NFT.

Let’s dig into the top 5 competitors’ strategies:

1st: 0xee6be24226223d8a89e41e1cb49f8ee3fb0503ab

Most traded: APT, ETH, AAVE

This trader traded ETH, APT, and AAVE directionally, and also frequently traded ADA for small gains.

2nd: 0x00000082bc916568cb4479d3a218dafa60ebba25

Most traded: AAVE, APT, BTC

This trader directionally traded AAVE, APT, BTC and traded PEOPLE in high frequency for small gains.

3rd: 0x6de115a3db519009665856115467f4e6250bfc

Most traded: AAVE, APT, ADA

This trader traded APT, AAVE, and ADA in high frequency.

4th: 0x73697bc0259e0edb7302ff96358dd9e1a2c13c28

Most traded: W, TRX, METIS

This trader repeatedly took advantage of short-term price movements on W to accumulate small gains.

5th: 0x7a27f6cae90184a9a67294bb0df9d77390dbc

Most traded: BTC

This trader had a strong directional bias towards BTC going down, and ended up being right.

What Did We Learn?

Similar to the previous competition, this week-long period was a valuable stress test for Omni. Different user behaviors are displayed when users have motivation to maximize their PnL, which helps us flush out issues and identify where things can be improved.

Some notable takeaways:

• This was the first competition since the introduction of limit and take profit/stop loss orders, and both were extremely popular. 39,701 (~17.4%) of the 227,968 total orders placed were limit orders, demonstrating significant interest.

• The most commonly requested features this time around were for more time frames on the chart, and adjustable leverage. We’ve taken this feedback into account as we implement some final improvements before mainnet!

• We saw a lot of traffic. This competition was timed to start around the same time as our seed fundraise announcement, which brought tens of thousands of new users onto the platform. We will continue to beef up our infrastructure to ensure we can handle any large spike like this moving forward!

Conclusion

Our second trading competition blew the first out of the water. We saw more than 10x growth across all metrics, with so much traffic after the fundraise announcement that we had to implement some last-second scaling fixes to keep the platform performant.

We will be hosting one more competition before we launch the Omni invite-only mainnet. The third competition is currently scheduled to take place once the portfolio and markets pages have been enabled on testnet. Make sure you’re following Variational on Twitter and are in the Variational Discord to know when the next one starts!