Fair price discovery using GBM

Hello there,

Today, Wednesday, 11th of January 2023 marked the release of GBM auctions for Aavegotchi wearables. As we could see throughout the whole GBM for Fakegotchis, that was released around 1 month, the whole price discovery is basically plagued by bots. Same with this one.

How the bots work, is that they cannot be a match for a human hand speed and they can forecast / prepare / presign the GBM bid signature. Basically, a human does not stand a chance.

I propose the following change to the GBM workflow: to have a period of soft bidding that can increase with a hammer time, where GBM rewards are not given to the previous highest bidder.

Current workflow:

  1. Create Auction tx, which is successfully mined.
  2. A period of 2 minutes needs to pass for the first bid tx to execute correctly. During this interval, a bot can presign the signature and wait to broadcast the tx exactly 1 second before the period ends, as Matic/Polygon has a medium interval of 1-2-5s a block.
  3. Bot broadcasts the tx (or spams more than one txs) at exactly 1s before, or 0.5 s before, you get the idea, at huge amounts of gas.
  4. Bot wins the first bid. Usually, there is more than one party involved, so bots compete, making the human user irrelevant.

Proposed workflow:

  1. Create Auction tx, which is successfully mined.
  2. A period of soft GBM starts, let s say 20 minutes. During which, any human user can bid without a GBM reward being sent on each new bid.
  3. If a bid is done during the 20 minutes, the hammer time resets to 20 minutes.
  4. If a new bid does not come in the 20 minutes we end the period of soft GBM.
  5. A new user bids, the previous highest bidder gets the 10% GBM reward.
  6. Bots cannot win.

This way, there is ZERO possibility for a bot to make the GBM rewards winning bid without a human being able to increase it if it makes sense. Usually, bots skim of the top, they don t try to win bids.

10 Likes

great post ser!
another option is to make those first 20 minutes a blind/dutch auction.

Instead of new bids prolonging indefinitely by adding 20 minutes, there will only be 20 minutes of blind bidding, highest bidder during those 20 minutes, is the first bid eligible for incentive payout

What do you think?

edit: realizing “blind” may be darn near impossible in blockchain, but dutch bidding for first 20 minutes might be just as good. in essence those 20 first minutes are a mini-auction for the incentive of that first bid.
it also benefits the seller, as sellers pay a bit more incentive when there’s many smol incremental bids vs just a few larger ones.

3 Likes

Can we even make changes to GBM, @coderdan? The whole system is protected IP, and presumably there’s some sort of licensing agreement

TransparentUpgradeableProxy | Address 0x6e3451367d1498487699dd70d6261089bddf205e | PolygonScan is skimming a lot of GHST off our community through botted bids.

I support any disincentives for botting through measures like this.

3 Likes

I think it can be improved by referring to the channel method. In the channel, the client gets an encryption key, and the contract will judge whether the encryption KEY matches, so as to determine whether the user has opened the Gotchiverse client for the channel

Can we refer to this method to use JS on the front end of Auctions to get the encrypted KEY and interact with the contract, thereby forcing users to bid from the WEB page?

I have played many blockchain games, and they all use this method to encrypt the interaction with the contract

2 Likes

One option would be to allow bids in a stablecoin, not GHST. Would people mind the bots as much if they are earning USDC instead of our ecosystem token?

1 Like

It still would be a bad UX for legitimate bidders.

Thanks for bringing this up and I agree there a few problems with the current mechanics. The rush of the GBM auctions felt previously with big releases simply isn’t there. Tbh I haven’t even bothered to look at the auctions once because I know they’re all botted and there’s no chance to play.

I believe your proposed mechanic is good and I would add another feature request:

Designated time auctions. People who want to sell something could feed their item into the system and then at specific intervals, they all get auctioned off together. This creates a bit more excitement around the whole experience. For example, we know that every Wednesday at X hour and Saturday at X hour, the items all go live. We could possibly even see what’s in queue.

The overall purpose of GBM ought to be getting people excited for actually buying an item, not just hoping to snipe a low bid and grab a profit and exit.

1 Like

I believe that the negative effect of bots is not that they sell all earned GHST, but that auctions with bots are not attractive (regardless of what currency the auction is in). I can’t tell my friends and invite them to this interesting exciting event because they won’t have a chance, only a total disappointment. Now the bots are still making small bets (like 50 ghst on link bubbly), but in a few days they will adapt the rates (like today 170 ghst on hazmat items) and then the sellers will pay the bots even more money, and people will win even fewer rewards and this will become completely uninteresting.

2 Likes

HI frens! Few weeks ago I thought that no one cares about bots on GBM (“bots is ok because it is blockchain”), But now I’m extremely glad that you are developing this topic. I really hope that this thread will not go out and together we will find a good solution to this problem! Thank you all for your interest, I will be involved in trying to find a solution to the best of my ability.

2 Likes

Doesn’t that generally defeat the purpose of the outbid rewards though? As much of the price discovery would be done during the soft GBM period, just without rewards. Just trying to wrap my ahead around the proposal.

If we are trying to provide items owners more liquidity possibilities why should it be GBM in the first place? Regular auction will do the same work and we won’t be paying bots owners.

Why not turn cartridges on and ban bots from the whole protocol?

1 Like

Funny. Remind me why spillover was turned off.

pls lets stop this auction until we are rid of bots is my opinion

1 Like

This is not a problem of GHST or USDC, it is an issue that has to do with the skimming of the top of market prices, which long term will basically dilute the actual economy. A botter will look for profit, not reinvestment.

2 Likes

You have to acknowledge the need of a trade-off.

GBM is what? A FOMO auction system where there is active price discovery at the expense of hot potato scenario. In a sense, is a very dangerous system where people can fomo into for rapid gains with the dis-adavantage they can remain with the asset in hand. But it works and it is fun.

There is zero fun when the initial bids are botted and will be botted if the system allows it. And the current system allows it.

I proposed the above easy to implement system, which is generic. furthermore, it comes with the following LICENSE: Beerware License | Software Package Data Exchange (SPDX). Putting it here once again.

I suggest the following changes to the GBM current changes (Beerware LICENSE):

Proposed changes to the GBM auction workflow https://www.gbm.auction :

  1. Create Auction tx, which is successfully mined.
  2. A period of soft GBM starts, let s say 20 minutes(HAMMER_PERIOD). During which, any user can bid without a GBM reward being sent on each new bid.
  3. If a bid is done during the HAMMER_PERIOD, the hammer time resets to HAMMER_PERIOD.
  4. If a new bid does not come during the HAMMER_PERIOD we end the period of soft GBM.
  5. A new user bids, the previous highest bidder gets the 10% GBM reward (10% is an example).

Basically, the GBM team can implement the idea at any time without any royalties, according to the Beerware license.

Thanks.

4 Likes

Love the Beerware license :slight_smile:

It does seem like bots are getting the majority (if not all) of the first bids, but I’d love to see any statistics of the total % of revenue going to the bots from the first few weeks of GBM if that’s available. I think there’s been a slight overreaction. People are saying it’s “zero fun” and that there’s “no point” in participating, but are the first bids really the key part of GBM? We had a really exciting auction this morning for a Sergey Beard that went through multiple hammer times, and I don’t think those bidders were bots. We’ve also seen some pretty exciting bids on godlikes, all of which seem to be genuine besides the first bid.

I would assume that since the bots are laying down the smallest bids, that they don’t account for anywhere close to the majority of the revenue earned so far. Yes, it stinks to see people botting the initial bids, and yes it would be great if we didn’t have any bots, but cancelling the whole system entirely would be throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

2 Likes

I’m concerned about the Forge GBM Auction extraction by botters. I’m really looking forward to the Forge but I wouldn’t like to see the auction experience ruined by this.

Another idea:

  1. When creating auction you can insert optional whitelist of addresses
  2. The first 20min only of auction can only be bid on by whitelisted addresses
  3. After 20min the auction opens to public

Advantages

  • Whitelists are optional if you cant be bothered
  • Getting on peoples whitelists is an activity that can bolster general community engagement
  • Still get 100% market pricing after 20min

Disadvantages

  • Bot addresses sneaking into whitelists (but this is an auctioneers perogative to check this)
  • Would GBM team be open to implementing?

Thoughts?