Author: danny Source: X, @agintender

Many people study the data on the chain to find out "whether there is a banker in this coin", and then try every means to avoid, embrace, and follow it. But the truth is - without bankers, the currency will not rise at all. Therefore, the really useful question is not "Is there a banker?" but "Which stage is the banker at?"—acquisition, promotion, shipment, or has it already run away?

Let me start with the conclusion: you will definitely be able to find the banker, because the banker is everywhere.

This article gives you a set of on-chain + off-chain signal framework. It does not allow you to act as a detective to catch the banker, but allows you to quickly judge whether the market at this moment is a stage friendly to retail investors.

1. On-chain signals: what chips and funds are saying

Remember: This version does not lack funds or data, but it lacks funds that are willing to end. Like all games, everything revolves around how to make you "pay to recharge". As long as you continue to pay attention, there are thousands of memes, and there will always be one that suits you.

1: Chip concentration - related wallets are combined and calculated. Concentration is not important, but the degree of concentration is important. Don't just look at the "Top 10 Holders proportion", everyone will see this number, and it is easy to be disguised - the dealer split the currency into 50 wallets, each holding only 1%, the Top 10 looks very "healthy". The correct approach is to open professional tracking software, look at the bubble chart, and combine the connected addresses (with direct transfer relationships) for calculation. If three wallets each holding 2% transfer funds to each other, then one person holds 6%. Let’s look at the buying time of these related addresses - if positions are opened on the same day or even the same hour, let me ask you, do you believe in coincidence?

Funding wallet analysis - Where did the initial ETH/BNB of these wallets come from? If the gas fees of 50 wallets all come from the same CEX withdrawal address or the same funding wallet, even if there is no direct transfer between them, they are most likely from the same person. If someone is collecting money, what do you think they want to do?

2: Trading volume reality - Vol / Holder (OI) number 24-hour trading volume ÷ total number of Holders = average trading volume contributed by each holder. If a coin with only 800 holders has a 24-hour trading volume of 2 million US dollars, and an average of 2,500u per person - there is a high probability that a few addresses are frantically flushing the volume, or a robot is running. Why do people spend money to boost trading volume?

3: DEX Liquidity Pool Monitoring Observe the increase or decrease in LP (liquidity pool) - the banker withdrawing LP/thickening LP is a signal to run away/fix work. If the LP is not locked (unlocked), or the lock is about to expire, the risk is extremely high. At the same time, observe changes in the depth of LP. If the price is rising but the depth of LP is getting thinner, it means that the bookmakers may be quietly draining liquidity and reducing their losses when preparing to run away, and vice versa.

4: Reasonability of changing hands - 24h Vol / Market value measures "what proportion of the market value is traded every day". Breaking it down by hour, if the trading volume in a certain few hours suddenly surges far beyond other periods, it means that someone is intensively washing the volume. The distribution of normal retail trading time is relatively smooth, and sudden spikes are likely to be the prelude to trouble. In addition, it is more valuable to look at net buy volume rather than total trading volume.

5: Number of transactions vs. trading volume—proportion of large orders. Look at the average amount of each transaction within 24 hours. If the top 10% of large transactions account for more than 60% of the total trading volume, the market is driven by a few addresses, and the price trend depends entirely on these addresses. (A better way is to use the Gini coefficient to quantify the concentration of transaction volume, between 0 and 1. The closer to 1, the more concentrated it is). When these addresses are not moving is more important than when they are moving.

6: Address/account/oi growth rate vs price change rate - determine which stage the banker is in. Combined with the calculation of the first 5 indicators (be sure to process, screen and calculate), you can then combine the data to analyze which stage the target is currently in?

• Acquisition stage: The price is trading sideways at a low level or even slightly falling, large addresses on the chain are buying slowly, and the number of wallets/accounts has not changed much. The banker is quietly collecting chips. (The number of associated addresses does not count)

• Pull-up stage: For example: For example, if the price rises by 30%, the number of wallets/accounts only increases by 5% → The chips are not dispersed, and a few people pull their own strings.

• Shipping stage (the most dangerous): The price is sideways or even slightly falling, but the number of wallets/accounts has increased (sometimes also reflected in the long/short ratio) by 20% → The banker is slowly shipping to retail investors at a high level. It seems that "the community is growing", but in fact the banker is retreating.

• Already running stage: The price has dropped, but the number of wallets/accounts has not decreased → retail investors have been trapped, and the banker has finished selling.

2. What happens after reading it?

Okay, you took the time to confirm that there is a banker, and it is still in the xxx stage. Then what? Change it? If you change to another one, there will still be a banker. Because——

3. Banker is not a bug, banker is the underlying structure of the game

Why does a Token rise? Pulling requires two things: chips + funds. These two things taken together are called pricing power. If the chips are not concentrated enough and the rights are insufficient, no one will have the motivation to pull the deal.

The concentration of chips is not a conspiracy, but a prerequisite for pulling the trigger. Without the banker, there would be no market.

4. What is the banker using to win you

Pricing power is just the ticket.真正让庄稳赢的，是他们做交易的方式和你完全不同。 You are relying on your feelings, while the banker is using the system.

• The banker's cost awareness: Calculate the profit of pulling and shipping, and do it if the EV is positive. Retail investors can trade with screenshots.

• The banker’s probabilistic thinking: Continuously revise probabilities and positions. Retail investors placed repeated bets.

• Zhuang's use of psychology: Create FOMO and use sunk costs to keep you stuck.

• The banker’s tool advantages: Able to hedge, have cost/information advantages, operational dimensions and fault tolerance space to overwhelm retail investors.

5. Why do retail investors win?

On the banker's home court, retail investors cannot win using the banker's rules. Information, tools, and psychology are all asymmetric. But there is an asymmetry that can be broken.

6. The biggest structural flaw of retail investors: they can only do long

When there is no perp (perpetual contract), the banker can only do long, but he does not need to go short. The reason is cost.

The banker's chip cost is as low as nearly zero (gas fee or early extremely low price). Even if it fell by 90%, he still made money, just "less money." The ultra-low cost gives him a lot of room for error.

But retail investors chase prices during the FOMO stage, and the cost may be 50 times that of the bankers. Your cost structure determines that you cannot afford a drawdown. Retail investors have neither short-selling tools nor low-cost safety cushions. The only scenario where you can make money is if you buy it and then it goes up, and you sell it before it goes down.

One direction, one window, the fault tolerance rate is almost zero. This is structural injustice.

7. What if retail investors can also go short?

When the signal points to the shipment stage and false prosperity - you don't just "run quickly", you can open a short position and let the banker's shipment turn into your profit. When the truth returns, you can be on the side of making money. Your analytical skills are finally no longer wasted.

8. Mechanism perspective: With short-selling rights, can retail investors have pricing power?

Let’s just say the conclusion: No.

The formula of pricing power is always: chips + funds. The essence of retail investors is that their funds are scattered and they work on their own. No matter how sophisticated the mechanism is, it cannot turn a plate of loose sand into a cannon. However, the introduction of decentralized spot leverage and lending protocols is not to allow retail investors to "become the banker", but to break the banker's "absolute monopoly" on pricing power.

Dismantling it from a mechanical perspective, this reshapes the structure in three dimensions:

1. Create "selling orders" out of thin air and deprive unilateral control of the market: In a pure spot market, if the dealer does not sell, there will be no selling pressure, and the left hand and the right hand can pull the market. However, after the short-selling mechanism intervened, retail investors lent tokens to the market through over-collateralization, and the originally "locked" dead chips turned into active selling. This forces a real capital cost to the banker's push. If the dealer wants to continue to pull, he must take the orders created by short selling with real money.

2. The symmetry of price discovery: puncture the "false narrative": In the past, when it was found that the dealer shipped or the narrative was falsified, retail investors could only "not buy", and the bad news could not be reflected in the decline. The short-selling mechanism allows retail investors to convert "bad information" into substantial sell orders, making the price trend no longer a one-way line-drawing game for the banker, but the real result of the long-short game.

3. Transformation from "broiler" to "hunter": The short-selling mechanism actually accelerates the life cycle of Meme coins. This mechanism cannot turn you into a banker who sets the rules, but it changes retail investors from "takers who can only be beaten" to "hunters with guns in their hands."

9. But short selling is not a panacea - the risks you must know

The risk of shorting Meme coins is extremely high, and there is theoretically no upper limit to losses. What bookmakers are best at is short squeeze. Deliberately pulling up the price triggers a short position liquidation, and uses your liquidation funds to further push up the price. The timing is wrong and the direction is right is a loss. Moreover, liquidity is poor, slippage is large, and short selling costs are also high.

Short selling is not about "making money if you understand it", it gives you one more direction to choose. You still need to control your position and set a stop loss. Short selling turns you from a "chip" to a "player", and players will also lose - but they lose with more dignity.

Finally

What this article teaches you is not "how to avoid dealers", but allows you to understand:

1. Bankers are everywhere, don't look for "coins without bankers", the key is to determine which stage the bankers are at.

2. The biggest disadvantage of retail investors is that they have a single direction. Zhuang has low-cost safety mats, but you don't. You can make money if you understand the rise, but you can only run if you understand the decline - this is unreasonable.

3. Short-selling rights are the last piece of the puzzle for retail investors from being "harvested" to "playing the poker table".

It's a weapon, not an amulet. Even if the gun has the risk of exploding, having a gun and not having a gun are two completely different levels of gaming. What we need is "peer-to-peer armed forces" so that retail investors can also have the ability to play two-way games.