How are the currencies traded by Wintermute, the top market maker in the crypto, performing? The result is surprising

The analyst dethective, who specializes in exposing the actions of KOLs (Key Opinion Leaders) who fleece investors, posted a report on X today sharing the trading performance of the well-known cryptocurrency market maker Wintermute.

How did Wintermute perform as a market maker

According to statistics, 67% of the Tokens that Wintermute acted as a market maker for had negative returns. If you had purchased Tokens traded by Wintermute in the past year, your investment would have declined by an average of 26%.

The worst-performing Tokens include many meme Tokens such as ZEREBRO, NEIRO, and MOTHER. It is worth noting that the return rates of Tokens on the Solana and Ethereum ecosystems differ greatly, with Solana-based Tokens returning -65%, significantly lower than Ethereum's -1.6%. dethective speculates that this may be because Wintermute has collaborated with low-quality meme Tokens more in the Solana ecosystem.

Zero-sum game

dethective believes that the cryptocurrency market can be viewed as a "ladder of interests," where not everyone has a fair chance to make money. Players at different levels have different resources and power, and retail investors at the bottom are often the last to pay:

• Project parties: Have the greatest control, able to dump Tokens at any time and even influence the operations of market makers.
• Exchanges: Indirectly affect price fluctuations by deciding whether to list or delist Tokens, thus controlling market liquidity.
• Market makers (MM): May engage in opaque market practices, such as the manipulation revealed in the Gotbit incident.
• KOLs/Influencers: Usually able to obtain a large number of Tokens in advance, affecting market sentiment and retail investor decisions.
• Retail investors: At the bottom of the market, often facing risks of information asymmetry and price manipulation.

Overall, the way this market operates is similar to a highly unfair game, where even if luck can affect investment results, it is essentially a game of chance, but here the roulette has not just "one 0," but "four 0s," representing an extremely high house edge. Therefore, before investing in Tokens, one should recognize the rules of this game and not become the "last to pay."