The return of the @buildawhale bid-bot

This is part of a series on how much delegators get from investing in bid-bots. See https://busy.org/@verodato/the-return-of-the-bid-bot for more information.

The visual and analytic exploration of the bid-bots funding and expenses continues today with the @buildawhale bid-bot. It was created in August 2017 and operates almost exclusively with funds delegated from two big accounts: @blocktrades and @minority-report.

Remember that delegations are temporary transfers of resources to the bid-bot account while expenses are permanent transfers made from the bid-bot account to other accounts. Expenses include interest payments to delegators and also refunds, messages (small value transfers with a text – the message – in the memo field), and other payments. The chart below shows the @buildawhale expenses by the type of the memo field of the transfer transaction. Most of the transfers did not have a text in the memo field until recently, and after that most transfers have been made using encrypted memo (a way to send a secret text to the account that receives the transfer). So the memo field does not reveal what we’d like to know: what are the interest payments to delegators?

When expenses are aggregated by the destination account, we get the results in the chart below. Here we can see that two accounts receive most of the expenses, @themarkymark and @alpha. But these are not the two main accounts that delegate to @buildawhale. @themarkymark is the creator of the @buildawhale account and a Steem witness (https://steemit.com/@themarkymark). Because we know that the @alpha account is associated with @blocktrades (https://steemd.com/@alpha), we can calculate a rate of return from the delegation of @blocktrades, considering that the interest payments related to this delegation are made to the @alpha account.

The delegation from @blocktrades started in September 2017 but interest payments from the bid-bot to @alpha - @blocktrades apparently started only in January 2018, as can be seen in the table below (values are in STEEM). The sum of all interest payments is $ 232,915. Divided by the monthly mean delegation balance of $ 1,170,260 results in a rate of return of 20% for the entire period of 10 months, or 22% annualized. This seems to be the best estimate of the return of the @buildawhale bid-bot, considering the information available.