Assessing a path, most people ask "does this method work". Ask the other one first: what does the best person on this path earn in a day? That number is usually obtainable, and it is frequently small enough to end the discussion — two lookups against a saving of several months.
| "Does it work?" first | "How much does it hold?" first |
|---|---|
| needs data, backtests, live money | two public numbers |
| weeks to months | an hour |
| answers "can it earn" | answers "is it worth earning" |
The wrong order is expensive: you can spend months proving a method works and then find it earns $30 a day. That $30 ceiling was available on day one.
| Question | Measured |
|---|---|
| What the best wallet earns | about $95 / day |
| Population median | −0.74¢/share (47 same-shape wallets) |
| Do rebates turn it positive? | No. Wallets holding $100–380 of rebates stayed net negative |
| Are the top players here? | No. None of the leading rebate wallets' recent thousand-odd fills |
Even being the single best participant in the ecosystem earns $95 a day. And the population median is negative — most people doing this are losing money. Most telling of all is the last row: the people best at this business have voted with their feet against the category.
All four numbers are publicly available and take less than an afternoon to assemble. What they answer is: is this path worth several months of your time?
| Category | Top daily income | Gap |
|---|---|---|
| Crypto up/down market making | about $95/day | — |
| Sports market making | about $545–3,739/day | 5.7× to 39× |
The same activity — posting quotes for rebates — with a ceiling an order of magnitude apart. Which is why the top players are all in sports: not because they are cleverer, but because they chose the right pool.
A caveata high ceiling does not mean it is easy. Sports market making is a different business needing different capabilities (odds modelling, devigging, multi-source data). A ceiling tells you whether it is worth it, not whether you can do it.
Market making is bound by pool share; directional strategies are bound by book depth:
| Percentile | Top-of-book size |
|---|---|
| median | about $94 |
| 10th | $13 |
Which gives the order size that extinguishes an edge: about $200 counting book-walking alone, about $90 once execution drift is included.
The strategy did not stop working — you overran it. See walking the book.
| # | Do |
|---|---|
| 1 | find a few wallets running the same approach as you (not just any winners) |
| 2 | query trading P&L and on-chain subsidy receipts, and add them |
| 3 | check the time span and convert to a daily rate (not the endpoint's default window) |
| 4 | read the population median, not just the best |
| 5 | ask: even the best only makes this — what makes me more? |
Subsidies do not enter the profit field. The leaderboard holds only the trading half; the other half is on-chain and must be queried separately and added, or you will systematically underrate subsidy-driven players.
The activity feed is capped. What you retrieve is at most a few thousand rows, which for a busy wallet may cover only tens of hours. Computing a daily rate requires dividing by the actual elapsed span — read the first and last timestamps — not by the number of days you assumed.
Both are in eight API traps.
"Does this method work" takes months to answer; "how much can this path hold" takes an afternoon — and it frequently ends the discussion outright. Check the ceiling before you decide to start.