Crazed NFT Fans

A new NFT has dropped, but its location is a secret! Fans have become crazed, and are sending funds to random wallets and calling gas guzzling contracts as fast as they can to hopefully snag it.

Using the fans on a simulated network (like geth in dev mode) can help you emulate network congestion events.

If using a simulated geth instance, you might find it helpful to turn on metrics.

Configure

Environment variables are used to configure everything about the crazed fans. You can set them in a .env file, or export them in your shell. See the example.env file for an example.

HTTP_URL="http://localhost:8545" # HTTP URL of the chain to run on
WS_URL="ws://localhost:8546" # WS URL of the chain to run on
CHAIN_ID="1337" # ID of the chain to run on
FUNDING_KEY="ac0974bec39a17e36ba4a6b4d238ff944bacb478cbed5efcae784d7bf4f2ff80" # Private key of the funding address
TARGET_GAS_PRICE="1000000000" # Gas price to target (in Gwei) as the peak on chain price.

Run

You need a simulated network to run on, like geth in dev mode. You can run one quickly with:

make start_test_node

which will give you a geth node running on localhost:8545 and localhost:8546 with the chain ID 1337.

Then, you can run the crazed fans with:

go run .

and see the live dashboard at http://localhost:3333.

Emulating a Network Congestion Event

This is the tricky bit. Gas is ultimately a market, and the price can be determined by a million factors, plus good old luck. I've done my best to find some general trends and emulate them to the best of my ability. I'm a fairly amateur data-scientist, but you can check out my efforts. I'm also looking at replicating certain notable events (e.g. crypto kitties launch) closely as possible.