Detecting a new mint
The events that reveal a launch: mint initialisation, curve account creation, the program event log, and how much of the state exists at the moment each one fires.
BH-01 Open the noteBehaviour: What the Chain Records Afterwards
Once an instruction has landed, the interesting question changes. It is no longer what somebody meant to do but what the ledger now says they did, and the ledger is unusually generous: it keeps the instruction order, the inner invocations, the program logs, the balance of every account before and after, and the slot it all happened in.
The three notes here work from that record outwards. One is about the earliest moment a launch becomes visible at all, one is about telling classes of automation apart by their marks, and one is about the specific sequence a completed curve leaves behind.
| Step | What happens | What the chain shows for it |
|---|---|---|
| 01 | A mint is initialised | Supply, decimals and authorities are written. At this instant almost nothing else about the token exists, and no trade is possible yet. |
| 02 | A curve account appears | The launchpad program creates its own state account for the token, usually a derived address, and funds it to the rent-exempt minimum. |
| 03 | The first trades land | Buys against the curve begin. Fan-out, funding shape and spacing in the first slots are the strongest available signal about who is trading. |
| 04 | Patterns become legible | A sniper, a bundler, a volume engine and a copy trader all leave different marks, and the differences survive changes of wallet. |
| 05 | The curve completes | A threshold in program state is reached, a flag flips, and further curve trades stop being accepted for that mint. |
| 06 | Liquidity is handed over | Reserves move out of the curve into an AMM pool that is initialised for the pair, after which price discovery happens somewhere else entirely. |
3 notes in this section
The observable side: how a new mint becomes visible to a listener, which patterns separate one class of automation from another in a trace, and what a migration writes when a curve finishes.
Bot classes in a trace
Snipers, bundlers, volume engines and copy traders leave different marks. What separates them is fan-out, funding shape, timing and the instructions they bother to send.
BH-02 Open the noteWhat migration writes
The moment a curve completes: the flag that flips, the reserves that move, the pool that gets initialised, and how to verify the handover without trusting a dashboard.
BH-03 Open the noteHow far a trace can actually be read
A trace proves what happened, not who did it or why. It shows that one funder paid for eleven wallets and that those wallets bought within four slots of each other, which is a strong structural signal. It cannot show intent, cannot prove common ownership, and cannot distinguish a deliberate campaign from a service used by eleven separate customers. Notes in this section state the difference every time it matters.
- Covered here
- Detection sources and their blind spots, trace signatures per bot class, and the write sequence produced by a curve completion
- Covered in Instructions
- The other side of the same transaction: what was sent, which accounts it named, and how the program decoded it
- Never published
- Attribution of a wallet cluster to a named person or product, or any claim that a pattern proves ownership
- Always stated
- The difference between a structural observation and an inference, so a reader can see where the evidence stops
Instructions What the program is asked to do The instruction layer: the discriminator that names a curve call, the account list it arrives with, the arguments it carries, and the state the program is allowed to change once it accepts them. Traces Reading the record back A transaction is a receipt with structure. Outer instructions, inner instructions, logs, balance deltas and the returned error all say something different, and most disagreements about bot behaviour are really disagreements about which of those was read. Terms The vocabulary, fixed once Discriminator, PDA, inner instruction, virtual reserves, event authority and the rest, defined in the sense this desk uses them so a sentence on one note reads the same way on another.