From top meme KOL to losing money and feeling speechless, why is Ansem not working anymore?

Author: Joyce, Siwei Guai Guai, BlockBeats

Last week, Ansem, a well-known trader in the Solana ecosystem, posted a tweet admitting that his trading performance has been extremely poor recently, making a series of wrong decisions. He has completely lost his edge in the current market and is even considering cashing out and exiting the market.

As a trader regarded by the community as the "Godfather of WIF," Ansem once achieved thousands of times returns on WIF, which had a market cap of over $1 billion. After WIF, he also witnessed the rise of BILLY, which reached a market cap of $200 million, and BODEGN, which peaked at $300 million, starting from zero. However, after several iterations of meme market gameplay on Solana, Ansem's golden touch seems to have faded.

What has Ansem experienced in these past few months? The address publicly associated with Ansem on the Solana network is AVAZvHLR2PcWpDf8BXY4rVxNHYRBytycHkcB5z5QNXYm. Based on on-chain data analysis tools from GMGN, BlockBeats compiled statistics on meme transactions actively participated in by Ansem's address from February to August 20 of this year, attempting to summarize his trading patterns. Here, 531 pure sell transactions, which generally belong to tokens gifted by project parties rather than actively purchased by the wallet address, were excluded, leaving 2,590 transactions considered as active meme trades by that address. It is important to note that due to the data format limitations of the Solana chain, the original data may have incomplete statistics, and the analysis results are for reference only.

The Rise of WIF

Before the analysis, let's discuss Ansem's history in the meme space, where WIF is the most important chapter in Ansem's legendary story. On December 1, 2023, Ansem's address spent $472 to buy the first WIF, with an initial purchase price of $0.0003, and added another $185 eight days later. After that, Ansem frequently bought and sold WIF, making multiple calls on his Twitter account.

More than four months later, WIF peaked at $4.9, nearly 16,000 times higher than Ansem's initial purchase cost. Ansem became a legendary trader in the Solana community and a golden caller due to his foresight in WIF.

Left: Trading records of Ansem's public wallet address on $WIF shown by Dexcreener; Right: Ansem promoting $WIF on X

Although Ansem entered the WIF market early and made calls, he is not a typical "diamond hand." From the trading records, Ansem is accustomed to frequent buying and selling, with over 80 purchases and 110 sales. According to data from cielo, Ansem's address invested a total of $2.14 million in WIF, selling for $2.85 million, achieving a realized profit of $804,000, with another $745,000 in profits yet to be sold.

After WIF, Ansem's address was monitored by more people. Consequently, many meme project teams sent their tokens to Ansem's address, hoping to use "Ansem's holdings" as a backing for their memes.

Following WIF, Ansem's impressive trading record also includes "BODEN." He bought BODEN in early March, and after the purchase, it experienced over a month of continuous growth, ultimately yielding a profit of $540,000. Shortly after holding, Ansem began to sell, but the signal "Ansem is in" spread widely on Twitter. In GMGN's data, several records of BODEN sold by Ansem show a token cost of $0, indicating that this portion came from external transfers rather than active purchases by that address.

Left: Trading records of Ansem's public wallet address on $boden shown by Dexcreener; Right: Community discussions about Ansem purchasing $boden

The Cost of Being a Whale

What happened after WIF? According to GMGN's statistical results, Ansem's address deposited a total of $1.93 million in SOL over the past eight months, with most occurring in July, where $1.32 million was invested in SOL. Correspondingly, his cost for meme trading in July was also the highest, at $3.39 million. Ansem's single purchase amounts have not been small. From April to now, his average single transaction volume has been around $3,000 to $9,000.

In terms of transaction frequency, Ansem's trading activity has increased over these eight months, with a peak in July, where he made 500 purchases, totaling over 800 transactions.

Over the past few months, high-frequency trading has become the survival rule for current Solana ecosystem meme players, with many players trading dozens of tokens in a single day. It is evident that Ansem is also gradually learning to adapt to this trading style. As his trading frequency increased, Ansem also invested more funds into the meme market, supported by more capital, and his highest single returns barely maintained an upward trend.

If we define the selling time as the time between the first purchase and the first sale of the same token, the average selling time for tokens purchased by Ansem in January and February was 91 days and 157 days, respectively, with these tokens only being sold from April to August. After that, Ansem's holding periods became increasingly shorter.

In terms of multiples, Ansem's peak wealth creation ended in May, with his return efficiency experiencing a sharp decline after May, and the returns in August likely mainly coming from meme coins he had accumulated in February. On the other hand, the proportion of Ansem's trades that achieved over 200% profit began to gradually rise after the sharp decline in May, perhaps indicating that Ansem has gradually learned to "double his capital."

Overall, Ansem's trading volume is still quite large compared to ordinary players, reflected in his trading records as slow profit-taking, frequent capital increases, and a lack of fully adapted diamond hand habits.

Neiro's Waterloo

By August, Ansem faced a real "Waterloo," with losses amounting to $448,000. The losses in August primarily stemmed from Neiro, where Ansem made 28 purchases, continuously increasing his position during the decline, ultimately investing $350,000 but exiting with a loss of 77%, losing $270,000.

Before this, the drawbacks of Ansem's trading habits had already manifested. Ansem's trading style leans towards "diamond hands." He prefers to focus on a specific token and continue betting on it, but this approach seems out of place in the current meme market. A token called HAMMY, which emerged in March, saw Ansem continuously buy and sell during its two months of rising prices, ultimately investing $200,000 and exiting with a 5% loss.

In July, Ansem achieved a single sell profit of $21,000 on the meme coin BILLY, which was launched on June 24. Ansem bought in shortly after the opening and successfully waited for high returns after it took off. BILLY reached a peak market cap of $281 million, and Ansem also gained hundreds of thousands of dollars in profit.

However, after BILLY peaked, Ansem continued to increase his position, and his profits on BILLY began to shrink. In the past month, Ansem has incurred a total loss of $80,000 on BILLY, with cumulative profits shrinking to $107,000. On August 20, Ansem was still increasing his position in BILLY, which also became the token with the highest number of transactions for Ansem, reaching 255 times.

A KOL's Meme Business

Do KOLs really lose money? If we only calculate the active buy and sell trading records of Ansem's public wallet address, based on existing data, we find that Ansem's address has lost $470,000 over these eight months.

However, in this calculation process, we have excluded situations where tokens were transferred into this wallet address from other addresses and then sold from this wallet address, and the actual selling profits from this portion amount to $2.25 million.

There are two scenarios for tokens being transferred to Ansem's wallet address: one is that project teams send a certain amount of tokens to Ansem to create the selling point of "Ansem's holdings," and the other is that Ansem's other wallet addresses buy tokens and then consolidate them into the public wallet address. Regardless of the situation, this portion of profit is not something ordinary retail investors can follow.

When including this portion of external transfer profits, Ansem's public wallet address has a total profit of $1.014 million. After becoming "famous," even if his understanding of the meme market and trading ability begins to decline, a KOL can still leverage their influence to gain considerable profits.

Looking back, Ansem's trading experience illustrates the various "incompatibilities" faced by a lucky individual who seizes opportunities and becomes a highly regarded whale in a rapidly changing market. There are no eternal winners in the crypto market. On the other hand, after advancing in the "food chain," Ansem no longer needs to rely on repeated chain-sweeping trades to gain profits. From starting with thousands of times returns on WIF to tweeting self-deprecatingly about exiting the market, Ansem seems to be past his prime, but new "legendary traders" are on the way.