Bullrun was a game concept I created on my way to EthCC in 2024. This was pre-vibe coding, so I had to "enlist" a number of the Infinex team to build the game. The concept was that people play a hand of crypto poker by selecting five cards from the top 50 tokens on CoinGecko. I had planned for the cards to be minted as NFTs, but unfortunately, we never got around to it (yet). Each day, the hand that had the highest score, based on daily price movements of the underlying asset, wins. The game ran for a little over a year before we wound it down (temporarily) last month.

At the start, the game had a few dozen players, then a few hundred, and within the first few months, we had over 9,000 players. In the first 40 rounds, we gave out three Patrons a day. Yes, I am as shocked as you are at this profligacy. I asked three different people to confirm whether we actually gave out $15k a day for a weird game, and they all agreed I definitely told them to do this. RIP.

We switched from Patrons to Bulls after 40 days and 40 nights, and unfortunately, this was somehow even more enticing for the bots than illiquid JPEGs. We got flooded. We had a minimum $50 deposit required to play, which was frankly too low. We saw the number of daily players rise to over 25k. Now, everyone knows there aren't twenty-five thousand people in all of crypto, so this was surprising. Then it grew to 69,420. Thankfully of our engineers had programmed a kill switch if we hit that number. The game halted, and it wasn't the first or last time this would happen. But the devs got it back online in time for everyone to finish the round.

Unfortunately, by this point, the few remaining human players were getting annoyed.

So we upped the minimum deposit to $250, this reduced the number of daily players from 69k to 10k the next day, but the numbers kept growing.

At this point, I reassured the meatbag players we would deal with the bots eventually, but even though we were now awarding Bulls to the top 2500 players, it was becoming increasingly difficult for humans to win. While this struggle was an entertaining presage to the upcoming erosion of all human achievement over the next decade, it simply could not stand.

And yet it stood for another 400 days. I'm not sure if there were even any human players left by the final round. Round 403. Which led to the "404 Round Not Found" joke.

But I had promised that before any rewards were distributed, we would drag all the bots out of their houses and hang them from the highest tree, then redistribute their bulls to worthy human players. And that is exactly what we intend to do.

Pandas and I, mainly Pandas, have spent the last two weeks tirelessly sifting through all of the data to rip the hearts out of every single one of those dastardly bots. And let me tell you, the numbers are grim.

Out of the top 50 Bulls holders, 40 were bots. Let that sink in.

Before we listen to the wails of agony and gnashing of teeth from the bot farm horde, let me explain one thing.

We tried really hard to prove someone was a human. And this is where it gets wild. There were so many bots that it was easier to validate human players than to isolate all the bots. That said, some of you were a little naughty. If you played on multiple accounts and limited your play to fewer than five accounts, we let you off with a slap on the wrist. Because tbh if we culled the people who played 2-3 accounts, we would have almost no one left. This graph by NoSeals gives some sense of the challenge.

We announced last week that everyone in the top 100 would win a Patron; these bad boys trade at around $4k each, so it was critical they not fall into the hands of vicious, savage bots. But we also promised crates to the top 1,000 players.

We did our best with the crates component, but I am going to level with you. There weren't that many humans after we reached rank 100. Yes, the prevalence of bots gets worse as you go deeper down the ranks. The reason more humans were in the top 100 than in the next 100 was that most of those players started early and banked a decent haul of bulls before the bots arrived. So yes, if you squint, the humans outplayed the bots by being early. Small victories.

But here is the problem. As we culled bots from the top thousand, their ranks were simply replaced by different bots. At that rate, we would need to search down to rank 5,000 to find 1,000 genuine human players.

So that is exactly what we did. But once we had achieved this, we were fatigued. Covered in blood and gore, surrounded by the severed limbs and heads of the bots, we had to wade through a sludge of dismembered bot corpses to even get a glass of water.

We did our best, but we simply had to apply a looser filter as we got deeper down the ranks. Which means, unfortunately, some bots slipped through our nets. We are sorry about this, but we hope you will be satisfied with the slaughter rained down on the bots we did catch.

If you came here for lurid tales of bot destruction, this is the section of the post you have been waiting for. We used so many methods to track these sneaky little bastards down. We used IP clustering, deposit and withdrawal clustering, x-handle heuristics, Telegram accounts, hand clustering, login times, and session data. Honestly, Pandas outdid himself. I actually begged him to stop killing bots and send me the sheet so there would be at least a few bots left for me to skull fuck, but he kept delaying the handover of the sheet through sheer bloodlust. In the end, I'm happy with the result. It is not perfect, but it is a far, far better result for humans than could reasonably have been hoped for before we started.

We were going to do a fancy page with all the winners, but everyone is busily handcrafting crates, so it seemed like a misuse of resources. Without further ado, I present the leaderboard.

There will be no discussion, and no debate. If you or a family member were mistakenly slaughtered in the bot purge, we humbly apologise and will be happy to send you a $20 discount voucher for your next swidge. We did our best to avoid the slaughter of innocent humans, but it would be wild if we didn't kill a few. Again, we humbly apologise, but it was for the greater good.