Solana volume bot configuration is a planning problem, not a settings problem

Every field in a run configuration is an answer to a question that was asked earlier. Campaign Desk writes the question first: what the run is for, which numbers would show it happened, how the budget is shaped across the window, and what the closing report has to say when the window ends.

Take a plan to the console Read the head plan

Objective before parameters
Every value stated as a trade-off
Report drafted before the run

The order the desk works in

01 Objective: One sentence a stranger could mark right or wrong after the fact.
02 Constraint: The budget, the window and the venues that are actually available.
03 Parameters: Wallet count, swap size band and interval, each chosen against the objective.
04 Pacing: The shape the budget takes across the window, including the final hour.
05 Gates: Written checkpoints where continuing is a decision rather than a default.
06 Report: The closing document, drafted while nobody knows the answer yet.

What this desk covers

There is a layer between owning a tool and getting a defensible result from it. This desk sits in that layer and nowhere else.

Objectives that can be marked

An objective is only useful if someone who was not in the room can decide afterwards whether it happened. Most stated objectives fail that test, and the rewrite is short.

See the rewrite

Parameters as trade-offs

No parameter has a correct value on its own. Each one is written here with the failure it causes when it is too low and the different failure it causes when it is too high.

Open the parameter sheets

Pacing and stage gates

A budget divided by an hour count is not a plan. Pacing is the shape the spend takes, and a gate is the point where continuing has to be argued for.

See how stages are cut

Four notes to read first

The head plan explains the document. The other three are the decisions inside it that people most often take by default.

Planning a volume campaign

The plan document itself: objective, constraint, parameter block, pacing curve, stage gates and stop rule, written in that order because each line constrains the one below it.

Head plan

Setting an objective you can test

Most stated objectives cannot be checked after the fact. The three properties that make an objective testable, and the rewrite that turns an ambition into a measurable claim.

Framework

How many wallets, and why

Wallet count is an overhead decision and a footprint decision at the same time. What too few costs you, what too many costs you, and the arithmetic that sits between the two.

Parameter

Duration and pacing

Pacing turns a budget into a shape. Four pacing curves, the objective each one belongs to, and why the last hour of a run is the part most often designed by accident.

Parameter

Two sections, two kinds of decision

Planning covers the decisions that shape the run. Parameters covers the three settings that carry most of its behaviour once the shape is agreed.

Planning

The decisions taken before any field is filled in: what the run is supposed to achieve, how that objective is written so it can be tested, how the work is split into stages, and what the closing report has to contain.

Open the section

Parameters

Three settings carry most of the behaviour of a run. Each one is written here as a trade-off with a named failure at both ends of its range, because there is no value that is correct independently of the objective.

Open the section

The eight lines a plan has to fill in

This is the parameter sheet the desk works from. Each line names what goes wrong at the bottom of its range and what goes wrong at the top, because the failures are different and only one of them is obvious.

Plan sheet: the failure at each end of the range
Line	Unit	What it decides	Too low	Too high
Objective	one sentence	What the run is for, written so that a reader who was not there can decide afterwards whether it happened.	Left blank or written as an ambition, so every result can be read as a success.	Loaded with four goals at once, so the parameters end up compromised for all of them.
Budget	SOL	The total the run may consume including fees, priority fees and the residue left stranded in wallets.	Too small to reach the pacing floor, so the run finishes before it has produced a readable signal.	Larger than the objective needs, which buys nothing measurable and removes the pressure to design.
Wallets	count	How many funded accounts the flow is spread across for the duration of the run.	A handful of accounts recycling, which reads as one participant and concentrates every failure.	Funding and rent overhead on accounts that never carry enough flow to matter.
Swap size	SOL per trade	The band each individual trade is drawn from, chosen against pool depth rather than against the budget.	Trades small enough that fees dominate and the run produces cost without turnover.	Price impact on every trade, so the campaign pays for its own slippage twice per round trip.
Interval	seconds	The gap between trades, and whether that gap is fixed, drawn from a range, or driven by an event.	A burst that empties the budget in minutes and leaves the rest of the window silent.	Activity so sparse that no observation window ever contains enough of it to register.
Duration	hours	The wall-clock window the run occupies, decided before the budget is divided into it.	A spike with a hard edge at both ends, which is the easiest shape in the world to read.	A run spread so thin that it is indistinguishable from the pair doing nothing.
Venues	list	Which pools and programs the flow is routed through, and how the budget is split between them.	One pool carrying everything, so the entire campaign has a single point of failure.	A split so wide that no individual venue shows a change worth looking at.
Stop rule	condition	The written condition that ends the run early, agreed before anyone has an opinion about the result.	No rule, so the run ends when the budget does and nobody ever decides anything.	A rule so sensitive that ordinary variance halts the campaign in its first hour.

When a plan is ready to be executed

A plan is ready when the objective is one testable sentence, the parameter block has a value on every line, the pacing curve is drawn rather than implied, and the report template is already written with its verdict lines blank. At that point the work moves from a document to a console, and the console only has to do what the document already decided.

Open a run sheet

How the desk works

Three commitments that decide what gets published here and what does not.

Ranges are reasoning, not recipesWhere a number appears next to a parameter, it is there to show which direction the trade-off runs, and the page says what breaks at both ends. No page here prints a value and calls it correct, because the objective decides the value and the objective is different every time.
Arithmetic is labelled illustrativeWorked examples exist to show the shape of a calculation. The inputs are chosen for clarity, they describe no real pair or run, and the sentence that carries them says so. Nothing on this site is a measurement of anything.
Out of scope stays out of scopeThis desk does not compare vendors, walk through a product interface, hold opinions on key custody, or argue about building versus buying. Those are separate problems with separate answers, and mixing them into a plan is how plans stop being readable.

Practical guides

The remaining notes, in the order they usually get needed.