Unveiling the Hidden Winners Behind DeFi: The "Scientists" Riding the Crest of the Wave
TechFlow Selected TechFlow Selected
Unveiling the Hidden Winners Behind DeFi: The "Scientists" Riding the Crest of the Wave
"The era of cryptocurrency tycoons is over. Now everyone's called a 'scientist'."
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insights“The era of crypto bigwigs is over. Now everyone’s called a ‘scientist’,” said an investor.
The DeFi boom has not only attracted billions in capital but also created a new profession: scientists.
This profession isn’t revered like traditional scientists. They are mysterious—some admire them for striking it rich, while others condemn them for disrupting the DeFi ecosystem.
It's a term coined by the Chinese crypto community. Abroad, these individuals are commonly referred to as "hackers"—highly skilled computer experts.
DeFi, or decentralized finance, claims to be a fair and open world where anyone can participate. Yet knowledge barriers and capital requirements are fragmenting this utopia.
They stand at the very peak of the DeFi wave. Technology is their gold-mining tool. Through intellect and speed, they race ahead to unearth one gold mine after another.
What Is a Scientist?
"DeFi has got the big three exchanges so anxious, they’ve completely lost their composure," said an exchange insider. Over the past month, the top three exchanges rushed to list dozens of DeFi tokens.
DeFi is considered the biggest game-changer in the blockchain world in 2020. Wave after wave of DeFi mania has quietly reshaped the crypto landscape.
In China’s crypto circles, debates have emerged between old and new retail investors ("noobs"), with the old ones left far behind. There are also growing claims that centralized exchanges (CEXs) will be replaced by decentralized exchanges (DEXs)—on August 30, Uniswap’s 24-hour trading volume surpassed Coinbase Pro for the first time.
Before DeFi took off, the logic in traditional crypto was simple: exchanges sat at the top of the pyramid. Exchanges extracted value from token funds, token funds from projects, and projects along with exchanges from retail investors.
But everything changed with the rise of DeFi.
“Projects raise private funding, private rounds exploit public sales, public rounds exploit Uniswap noobs, Uniswap noobs exploit Hoo and MaiCoin users, and Hoo/MaiCoin users exploit the old guard on the big three exchanges—that’s today’s crypto market,” said one investor.
DeFi projects don’t need listing fees, backing from major capital players, or even private fundraising—they appear like airtight, impenetrable walls.
So who can exploit these projects?
A group known as “scientists” has surfaced.
These crypto “scientists” aren’t respected like real-world scientists. They’re a new breed born out of the DeFi frenzy, and there are several interpretations of what they do.
One view: Scientists are those who exploit loopholes across various protocols using DeFi applications to speculate and arbitrage for massive profits.
Another: People who specialize in farming DApp and DeFi rewards (“Super Bitcoin,” a Chinese crypto blogger).
Yet another: Programmers who accidentally entered crypto and used technical skills to gain substantial side income (Fenghuolun Community).
However, the term “scientist” doesn’t exist in Western crypto communities. The more common term is “hacker,” indicating that “scientist” originated in Chinese crypto circles.
There’s no consensus on the definition of a scientist, but the undeniable commonality is that they are people profiting from DeFi using technical prowess—essentially, tech-savvy yield farmers.
They operate discreetly yet remain impossible to ignore. Opinions about them are divided—some see them as loophole-exploiting speculators, others as skilled professionals earning what they deserve. Most of all, many aspire to become scientists—the unstoppable kings of the DeFi world.
“Your level of understanding determines your level of profit. In this bull market, the biggest winners are still the ‘scientists’—zero cost, zero risk. Learning a programming language is truly essential. I wonder if it’s too late to start learning Python now?” said one investor enviously.
The Scientist’s Bull Market
“This is the scientists’ bull market,” said an investor in the TechFlow community.
“Scientists are always in a bull market,” replied Dai Dai, founder of DeFi Labs.
DeFi applications are built on smart contract code deployed on-chain. Regular users must understand certain properties and features of smart contracts to participate safely.
Yet ordinary users frequently run into trouble during DeFi interactions. On the third day of SushiSwap’s launch, one user mistakenly transferred 400,000 USDT due to misunderstanding how DeFi works—the user was suspected to be Wang Tuanzhang, a well-known figure in traditional crypto circles.
Take YAM, for example. When its second mining pool first opened, a bug blocked most miners from accessing the platform. Only a few code-savvy “scientists” managed to secure the initial rewards.
Generally, scientists employ three main strategies:
1. When new tokens or DeFi projects launch public offerings on DEXs like Uniswap, scientists enter testnets to “grab the first block,” acquiring new tokens at minimal cost and selling them at high prices to retail investors upon official launch.
2. Using Aave flash loans, which require programming skills and serve developers directly without collateral. In February, a scientist exploited the DeFi lending protocol bZx to earn hundreds of thousands in paper profits from a single transaction.
3. Joining project teams—akin to securing a formal position. For instance, YFII reportedly has over 70 scientists involved in contract development, front-end engineering, and strategy design.
In the DeFi world, there are no legal regulations or moral constraints. “The money is sitting on the table—grab it if you’ve got the skill,” said one scientist to TechFlow.
Scientists can destroy or “kill” a project. On July 20, the first liquidity mining project on EOS, DeFis Network (DFS), launched and attracted numerous “scientists.”
These scientists created fake token pairs to conduct one-way mining, allowing them to mine DFS tokens simply by paying transaction fees—effectively mining at zero cost. After DFS launched, scientists dumped the token indiscriminately, causing its price to plummet by up to 97%.
Later, the project team patched the vulnerability, but by then DeFis had already become a machine for scientists to farm rewards, forcing the team to suspend transaction-based mining. Due to flawed mechanism design, DFS collapsed within three days.
The SKALE Network (SKL), an elastic blockchain, originally planned to launch its public sale at 12:00 PM Eastern Time on August 17, but was forced to delay due to overwhelming traffic.
“Skale was taken down by scientists,” explained one investor.
Killing such projects doesn’t weigh on scientists’ conscience. Protocol loopholes are their gold mines.
“Isn’t it fair that we stay up all night monitoring Discord and Twitter just to grab the first mining rewards? Should we let uninformed stock investors reap the benefits instead? Would that be reasonable?” asked a scientist on YFI.
A reader told TechFlow of a scientist who earned 80 million yuan ($11.5M) from YFI. Stories of scientists becoming overnight millionaires are everywhere in today’s DeFi space.
Scientists dominate the DeFi world—but they’ve also suffered setbacks.
On the night of August 20, many scientists were scammed by DZI, a JustSwap-based “AMPL clone.”
Because the DZI team failed to inject liquidity during testing, scientists flooded the trading pair with TRX, driving the DZI price up by over 100 million times. One scientist swapped 320,000 TRX for just 0.0004 DZI. Given DZI’s initial price was $1, this meant their investment crashed by tens of thousands of times instantly.
“This might be the only project that made scientists lose money,” someone mocked in a chat group.
Scientists: Children of the Tide
DeFi scientists are comparable to tech-savvy coupon harvesters in the internet world.
During the subsidy wars of the mobile internet era, professional coupon harvesters emerged. Since each phone number could register only once to claim a single reward, these professionals developed an entire industry around SIM card farming, account registration, SMS verification services, and reward harvesting.
In December 2018, Starbucks launched an “App Registration New User Gift” campaign. Coupon harvesters exploited it by creating fake accounts and claiming promotional coupons, forcing Starbucks to urgently shut down the promotion. It was reported that Starbucks lost tens of millions of yuan in less than a day and a half.
During the ICO craze of 2018, projects lured users with token airdrops—another golden opportunity for coupon harvesters. Rumor has it that someone used 400 email addresses to farm ONT airdrops and made hundreds of thousands from selling the tokens.
After the mobile internet subsidy wars and ICO bubble faded, the current DeFi boom naturally attracts the same crowd.
In June, Compound launched “liquidity mining,” effectively subsidizing liquidity providers—a strategy similar to those used by internet companies. The subsequent wave of liquidity mining drew in billions of dollars—recently, total value locked (TVL) in Ethereum DeFi surpassed $11 billion.
In this DeFi wave, profits mostly go to scientists and large holders. Technical know-how and capital form their entry barriers. Retail investors struggle to benefit and often lose funds due to lack of technical understanding, earning them mockery as “stubborn old noobs.”
Crypto blogger “Super Bitcoin” said: What new noobs? Those actually making money in this DeFi wave are all seasoned players—whether fast-moving scientists cracking wealth codes or capital-backed yield farmers.
Top-tier scientists create the rules—like YFI founder Andre Cronje and YFII initiator Gao Jin—who lead the DeFi revolution. Second-tier scientists exploit existing rules, hopping between farms to “mine, sell, and cash out,” laughing as CEX users “take the bag.” No matter whether DeFi thrives long-term or fades quickly, they’ll remain winners.
As James P. Carse wrote in *Finite and Infinite Games*: There are only two kinds of games in the world—“finite games” and “infinite games.” Finite games are played to win; infinite games are played to continue playing.
Undoubtedly, regardless of DeFi’s ultimate fate, the scientists’ infinite game will go on. Standing at the forefront of the era, they bear witness to the rise and fall of an industry.
*TechFlow reminds all investors to beware of high-risk speculation. The views expressed in this article do not constitute investment advice.
Join TechFlow official community to stay tuned
Telegram:https://t.me/TechFlowDaily
X (Twitter):https://x.com/TechFlowPost
X (Twitter) EN:https://x.com/BlockFlow_News
