The passive dust-bid grid
A real wallet grinds out six figures resting cheap bids on both sides of every crypto candle, fee-free. We simulated the same grid honestly for a week. It lost 31.6%.
The hypothesisAn audited real wallet earns steadily by resting dust bids (20–40¢) on BOTH sides of every 5-minute crypto candle — paired fills form $1 complete sets bought below $1, unpaired fills are cheap lottery tickets, and makers pay zero fees. Replicate the grid, replicate the income.
The test
A read-only simulation rested bids at 20/30/40¢ on both outcome tokens of every live candle, filling only by the crossed-book rule — a bid "fills" only when the live best ask actually trades down through it, the most honest fill standard available without placing orders. Each candle settled as complete-set pairs plus the unpaired remainder at resolution. Both sim biases were documented up front: polling undercounts real fills (conservative), and having no queue position overcounts them (optimistic).
The result
−31.6% ROI on $174k of simulated volume across 15,366 settled candles. The asymmetry is the whole story: a resting 30¢ bid fills precisely when the price crashes through it — meaning the candle is going hard the other way — so unpaired "cheap lottery tickets" arrive pre-selected to lose, while the profitable paired fills require the price to whipsaw through both sides' levels within five minutes, which is rare. The real wallet survives this because it stands at the front of enormous queues, capturing benign two-way flow before the adverse selection bites; a copier joins the back of the same queues and receives only what the front didn't want.
Conclusion
Market-making income is rent on queue position and infrastructure, not on the idea of resting bids. The strategy is real, the wallet is real, and the copy is still worthless — the clearest example in this lab of an edge that cannot be replicated by knowing about it. When a strategy's profitability depends on being first in line, its description is not a recipe; it's a museum placard.