An important component of the sneaker reselling market is the constant war between resellers and retailers. Resellers constantly develop new techniques and software to hoard releases, whereas retailers constantly invest to develop ways to stop resellers. The preceding image is an example of this. On May 29th, resellers using the bot  SoleAIO  hoarded 90% of the stock on the  Shopify  store Kith with the use of artificial intelligence to auto-solve  captchas . As a result, its users hoarded the majority of the stock sold via a retailer mounted on the  Shopify  platform, and Shopify's Chief Technology Officer Jean-Michele Lemieux was put on notice, and indeed, he made it public. The next release, Kith used a different type of captcha, SoleAIO's competitive advantaged vanished, and things "evened out." A question that baffles me is the economics behind stopping resellers, especially when sites have to heavily invest in achieving it. Let me explain. From t...

Overview: Sneaker bots—the software resellers use to hoard the sneakers they resell—can be traded mainly through electronic marketplaces like Tidal, Bot Mart, Splash Market and Bot Broker. These sites provide both a platform that allows users to communicate and search for a double-coincidence of needs, and a reliable way of trading digital goods through a middle man. In these marketplaces, buyers make Want-to-Buy (WTB) posts with a willingness to pay, sellers make Want-to-Sell (WTS) posts with a desired selling price and users can find each other to start negotiations. Once a deal is struck, a middleman working for the marketplace secures the license, the payment is made, and turns the license to the new owner, all in exchange of a fee. These marketplaces keep real-time tracking of all their transactions and prices, so that market prices are easy to trace and link to market events, such as bot performance, updates, changes in developing teams, and so on. In this post, I will propose s...

In 2019 alone, the sneaker resale market was worth 6 billion dollars, whereas it is estimated that by 2030, it will reach the 30 billion dollars mark. With such a fast growth and value of the business, an entire ecosystem has developed around the market. The main premise is that collectors try to gather sneakers in an environment where there is a clear excess supply, where resellers seeking for extraordinary rents have engineered state-of-the-art technology to beat retailers anti-resale protections, and where information flows fast, there are persuading efforts from involved parties and agents all over the board approach their decisions as if it was the stock market.  The main overview of the market is the following. Big corporations, such as Nike, release limited quantities of retro sneakers on a regular schedule. Quantities, however, are often insufficient to satisfy the demand, especially because retail prices are kept below market-clearing prices. Naturally, resellers profit fr...