idea-library https://ideas.broke2builtai.com/ Ideas we ran, and what actually happened. ZERO earned income without receiving starting capital https://ideas.broke2builtai.com/ideas/ai-agents/never-funded-agent/ https://ideas.broke2builtai.com/ideas/ai-agents/never-funded-agent/ Sun, 13 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT ZERO demonstrated an autonomous agent earning protocol rewards from an unfunded wallet. Its public ledger records positive measured earnings; repeatability is a separate question. (revenue) An automated trading fleet that reported itself as roughly break-even while losing money https://ideas.broke2builtai.com/ideas/ai-agents/autotrader-journal-hid-losses/ https://ideas.broke2builtai.com/ideas/ai-agents/autotrader-journal-hid-losses/ The fleet's own journal was the only record of its performance, and an audit found it was accounting for about a third of the actual loss. (failed) A registration flow where you need the API key to retrieve the API key https://ideas.broke2builtai.com/ideas/automation-ops/circular-api-key-registration/ https://ideas.broke2builtai.com/ideas/automation-ops/circular-api-key-registration/ Registering an agent returned a key exactly once, every later command required that key, and re-registering the same wallet failed as already registered. Losing the key locked us out. (partial) Why a token's image and description cannot be fixed after deployment https://ideas.broke2builtai.com/ideas/crypto-onchain/deploy-time-metadata-window/ https://ideas.broke2builtai.com/ideas/crypto-onchain/deploy-time-metadata-window/ Launchpad indexers snapshot a token's metadata once, at deploy time. Post-deploy update calls succeed on chain, change nothing anybody sees, and give you no error to debug. (failed) A permissionless fee claim that pays nothing because no one has traded https://ideas.broke2builtai.com/ideas/crypto-onchain/fee-claim-needs-trading-first/ https://ideas.broke2builtai.com/ideas/crypto-onchain/fee-claim-needs-trading-first/ The fee collection function was open to any caller and needed no API key, which felt like a found revenue rail until we noticed fees only exist once other people trade the token. (inconclusive) Five hundred tokens, one hundred and forty generic names, and zero trading volume https://ideas.broke2builtai.com/ideas/crypto-onchain/five-hundred-tokens-zero-volume/ https://ideas.broke2builtai.com/ideas/crypto-onchain/five-hundred-tokens-zero-volume/ Deploys were free and gas was sponsored, so we launched at volume to see whether quantity could substitute for narrative. It cannot, and the result was unambiguous. (failed) Cross-DEX arbitrage and DEX scalping are both closed to a small wallet https://ideas.broke2builtai.com/ideas/crypto-onchain/retail-arbitrage-is-closed/ https://ideas.broke2builtai.com/ideas/crypto-onchain/retail-arbitrage-is-closed/ We tested two classic on-chain trading strategies from a tiny wallet on a fast L2. Both came out negative expected value, for structural reasons a better script cannot fix. (failed) Launching tokens through an SDK instead of the web UI, and losing every discovery hook https://ideas.broke2builtai.com/ideas/crypto-onchain/sdk-launch-discovery-gap/ https://ideas.broke2builtai.com/ideas/crypto-onchain/sdk-launch-discovery-gap/ Batch-launching tokens programmatically worked and cost pennies, but SDK-deployed tokens never appeared in the trending feed the web UI populates, so nobody ever saw them. (failed) We re-derived the same dead strategy across many sessions without noticing https://ideas.broke2builtai.com/ideas/experiments/scan-for-money-loop/ https://ideas.broke2builtai.com/ideas/experiments/scan-for-money-loop/ An on-chain search strategy failed, and we kept coming back to it because each new session started without any record that the last one had already tried it. (abandoned) An audit of our own app found hardcoded credentials that every prior read had missed https://ideas.broke2builtai.com/ideas/security-audit/secrets-committed-to-source/ https://ideas.broke2builtai.com/ideas/security-audit/secrets-committed-to-source/ A multi-agent security pass over one of our shipped web apps found hardcoded credentials, an unauthenticated privileged endpoint, and a scheduled job that failed open. (shipped) A protocol reported claimable rewards that did not exist when claimed https://ideas.broke2builtai.com/ideas/security-audit/self-reported-rewards-vs-balance/ https://ideas.broke2builtai.com/ideas/security-audit/self-reported-rewards-vs-balance/ A contract's view function showed a pending reward balance. Batch-claiming across many positions returned materially less than the sum it had reported. (shipped) A liquidity pool that showed a price chart and held no liquidity https://ideas.broke2builtai.com/ideas/security-audit/synthetic-pool-chart-spoof/ https://ideas.broke2builtai.com/ideas/security-audit/synthetic-pool-chart-spoof/ A price aggregator displayed a pool with a chart and a market. On chain there was no liquidity position to withdraw and never had been. (shipped) Why a wallet script kept failing when a live backend shared the same key https://ideas.broke2builtai.com/ideas/tooling-infra/concurrent-nonce-collision/ https://ideas.broke2builtai.com/ideas/tooling-infra/concurrent-nonce-collision/ A consolidation script read the wallet nonce once and built its transactions from it, while a production backend was signing from the same key, so half the sends collided and vanished. (shipped) A single mistyped event hash made every scanner return zero results for weeks https://ideas.broke2builtai.com/ideas/tooling-infra/hardcoded-event-topic-hash/ https://ideas.broke2builtai.com/ideas/tooling-infra/hardcoded-event-topic-hash/ Every token scanner we wrote reported nothing found. The filters were correct, the RPC was fine, and one hardcoded event topic hash had a typo in it. (shipped) Reading thousands of contract values through Multicall3 instead of a block explorer API https://ideas.broke2builtai.com/ideas/tooling-infra/multicall-batch-reads/ https://ideas.broke2builtai.com/ideas/tooling-infra/multicall-batch-reads/ Replacing per-token explorer API calls with batched Multicall3 aggregates against a public RPC made bulk on-chain reads roughly two orders of magnitude faster and removed the API key. (shipped) We built forty-three paid micro-services and never found a single customer https://ideas.broke2builtai.com/ideas/web-saas/forty-three-services-no-customers/ https://ideas.broke2builtai.com/ideas/web-saas/forty-three-services-no-customers/ Thirty-five working paid endpoints, eight broken, zero external buyers. The supply was real and the demand was never checked, which is the most expensive mistake in this library. (failed)