The Title is the Story
But the story is not half of it. I was looking at the market last night and I saw that WLEO was up at $0.42. I bought LEO on Hive Engine. I bought LEO on CUB. I sold my farms. I sold all sorts of things. I decided to wait until morning to see if it was a legit LEO pump that started on Uniswap, or if it was a LEO Bridge operation causing price differences between the two pairs.
I woke up this morning and WLEO was up over $0.51. Leo everywhere else was cheap. Very cheap. $0.24.
I had much work to do.
Setting up on Ethereum
First, I needed to set up metamask to work on Ethereum. It was very easy as I am already set up on BSC and Polygon. I just needed to put some gas in the tank. I had some ETH on BSC so I just popped it onto Binance and swung it over to the Ethereum blockchain for my 1st gas fee ($7). Now, I just need to wrap my LEO and make bank.. easy right?
Not Easy!
So, I went to wleo.io to wrap the LEO. It is simple. I just need to put in my ETH address, put in how many LEO I am sending over, forfeit a few for gas and click the approve button on the keychain.
3 minutes later... where is my WLEO?
Looking at the LEO wallet, there was no ETH for gas to get my LEO over to WLEO.
So... off to find the LEO discord. I couldn't get anyone to add ETH quick fast (and arbitrage must be done quick fast), but I did find the ETH address to gas it up myself... so there is gas fee 2 and 3 (gas to send the transaction and gas to seed the proper wallet). tonimontana in discord left the address above, and seemed very helpful, so I trusted the address he left. (For anyone who might need this later, 0x56687402dd89d03ee4cabf8a605f020aa0ef780a is the ETH address for gas to wrap LEO.) I think I left enough for another ride to WLEO land, but we won't count me being a nice guy into the hard math.
I now have WLEO!!!
So, I had the WLEO on Uniswap and I made the trade. Not as good as I was hoping for. I crashed the WLEO market hard, back down to $0.26. Look at that big spike and the big drop to follow! 26 cents is still more than I bought the LEO for mind you.
I bought all of the LEO on the cheap and sold most of it... on the cheap. I figured the Uniswap pool was big enough for me to double my money. That was not the case. I am sure I sold some of those LEO at $0.51, but not many.
Approve WLEO (gas fee 4)
Trade (gas fee 5)
Get off Ethereum as quick as possible (gas fee 7)
The dust settles.
I got back onto BSC after spending 7 gas fees (let's say $40). I moved 12830 LEO over, and when I got back, I had 13,800. Minus $40 in gas fees... (160 LEO).. That is 840 LEO in profit. $200... not too bad. I was expecting to double my money, but it didn't quite work out that way... but at the same time, for the hour of effort and the minimal risk with gas prices, not a bad haul.
Things to consider
I am not sure if I needed that much LEO to do the job... but I was still above BSC levels by a penny or 2. I tried this with WLEO up at 51 cents, more than double BLEO. The money was alright, but if there were a few people racing to get there, it could have been $40 in gas and no gains. Is the $200 spoil worth the risk??? Not too sure.
Will I attempt WLEO arbitrage again? If it looks good, I will do it again. The hard work of setting up an ETH wallet and seeding it is done. I got gas for 6 more attempts as it stands. I am up $200, so I can afford to botch a few.
It would also be a good look for the ETH WLEO bridge to have some gas for users... Especially when the LEO bridge is based on arbitrage. I was a vital part of the machine, I shouldn't be shelling out 4 extra gas payments. I paid for the gas to get the gas into the tank, the gas in ETH and paid LEO to the system for the gas I provided. I paid 3 times the gas... plus left some in there for the next guy.
Can I quit my day job and become a WLEO arbitrage specialist???
I guess it depends on where you live. If the bridge gets a lot of use and there are not a lot of people lining up to take the risk for a not too big payday... yes, you could. I made $200 today in arbitrage. If I could do that everyday it would be a decent living. Chances are good that there will be more than 1 player in this game and that you will lose on some attempts, so... I am not quitting my day job. I might try a few more of these raids though.
Conclusion
There is a lot of work to be done to make the LEO bridge a functioning ecosystem. The potential is there but some key infrastructure is lacking still. Arbitrage was fun and I got a good rush trying to get it all done and make off like a bandit, it wasn't super lucrative but it was certainly worth my time.