We flipped 20,000 coins for 17 days
A coin beat all four US models about 2 times in 3.
beat all four US models
beat every AI, the winner too
beat GPT-5
Coin vs AI
Six AI models traded real money. Could a coin do better?
In October 2025, six famous AI models got $10,000 each to trade crypto for 17 days. Four of them lost money. Hand your $10,000 to a coin instead.
$10,000Day 0 of 17. Heads bets up, tails bets down.
These are the real final scores. Your coin starts in the middle with $10,000.
Why a coin can win this
Seventeen days is a very short race. Crypto prices jump a lot from one day to the next. Trade with borrowed money on top, and luck decides most of the score.
Six players is a tiny field. Somebody has to come first, and the winner gets the headlines. Nobody runs a coin next to them to check.
This happened
A US research firm called Nof1 ran the contest, called Alpha Arena. Each AI model got $10,000 to trade crypto contracts on the Hyperliquid exchange, with the same instructions. Every trade was public.
Alibaba's Qwen3 Max finished up 22.3%. DeepSeek made 4.9%. The four US models all lost: Claude 30.8%, Grok 45.3%, Gemini 56.7% and GPT-5 62.7%.
The headlines said Chinese AI crushed Western AI. Maybe it did. But a plain coin in this toy beats all four US models most of the time. A two-week race between six players cannot tell skill from luck.
Before you trust an AI trading contest, ask: how long did it run, and what would a coin have done?
Sources
- Vincent Chow, "Alibaba's Qwen returns 22 per cent in 2 weeks, beats DeepSeek, OpenAI in crypto trading showdown", South China Morning Post, November 4, 2025: Qwen3-Max made 22.32% on US$10,000 over two weeks; DeepSeek V3.1 Chat made 4.89% and was the only other model with a profit; the models traded crypto perpetual contracts on Hyperliquid.
- Nof1, Alpha Arena season 1, final leaderboard on November 3, 2025, as reported in the press the next day: Claude Sonnet 4.5 −30.81%, Grok 4 −45.3%, Gemini 2.5 Pro −56.71%, GPT-5 −62.66%. One tracker lists GPT-5 at −58.74%. The season was reported to start on October 17 or 18, 2025.
- The coin is made up. It trades a made-up crypto market for 17 days. The market swings about 3% a day. Heads bets up and tails bets down, with 4 times leverage, paying 0.1% a day in fees for each unit of leverage. The 20,000 coins above use the same rules.