Today I burned another 2,500,000 opXEN in the dbXEN protocol. For some time now, I’ve been making sure to do this every single day — without emotions, without expectations of “big rewards.”
The reality is that in dbXEN it’s very easy to disappear in the pool. All it takes is someone burning 2,500,000,000 tokens in a given cycle and my percentage share becomes negligible. Most of the time it ends with a reward of around ~1 dbXEN. There have also been extreme cases, though — when I was the only participant in the cycle and received the entire pool.
From a long-term perspective, the outcome is simple:
I currently hold over 10,000 dbXEN, all of it working inside the protocol and generating ETH daily from burned XEN. No trading. No price guessing. Pure mechanics.
Automation: a script that already “robbed” me (and luckily, cheaply)
The script I use is now in its third development phase.
The most important changes:
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automatic XENFT minting every 3 seconds,
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operating at very low gwei (0.000003),
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the ability to manually change gwei directly in the code,
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a critical cost-protection mechanism.
OP can have very low gwei, but transaction costs on OP depend on L1 Ethereum. That’s what caught me off guard once. L1 spiked, and OP transaction costs jumped 100x. The script was working correctly, the network looked “cheap,” yet it was draining my ETH balance.
Fortunately, we’re talking about ~$2.5, because minting opXEN at minimum parameters is ridiculously cheap. But the mechanism was clear:
without safeguards, automation will do exactly what you tell it to — even if it makes no economic sense.
That’s why I added a hard condition:
if the transaction cost exceeds 0.0000008 ETH — the script stops
Conclusions
This is not a story about “parasitic yield” or quick profits. It’s about:
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consistently burning value today,
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in exchange for mechanical, protocol-driven flows tomorrow,
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and learning that automation without cost control is asking for losses.
The blockchain does not forgive assumptions.
Code does not “feel the market.”
If you don’t secure the edge cases — the market will do it for you.
