Foreword

Recently, the Telegram bot venue has risen out of nowhere, and the price of Unibot tokens has skyrocketed 10 times, causing a new round of FOMO sentiment in the crypto market. In this article, we will do an in-depth analysis of the whole landscape, explain in detail the business performance of the representative projects, explore potential investment opportunities, and make necessary tips on risks.

*This article is only for research and discussion, there may be bias and errors in facts, data, and opinions, and does not constitute any investment advice, and does not assume legal responsibility.

Key Insights

♦ Based on Telegram's huge number of daily active users, Telegram bots let users realize simple functions directly through the mobile terminal. Main defi features include trading, sniping, copy trading, airdrop farming, and so on, which successfully cater to the needs of players chasing meme coins. Also, Telegram bots can introduce new users to the crypto space.

♦The recent triggering point of the track is the Unibot. Its token market capitalization accounts for more than 70% of the overall venue, and the transaction volume and number of transactions are also far ahead of other competitors; the pioneer project Maestro Bots has an advantage in terms of the number of users; the cumulative total agreement revenue of the DEX bots has reached $28.7M, and Maestro's cumulative agreement revenue of $8M is ranked first.

♦ The vast majority of Unibot's protocol revenue comes from transaction tax, which reflects the speculative behavior of UNIBOT tokens and is not sustainable. Due to the recent decline in the proportion of tax, the protocol revenue also shows a downward trend, and the bots transaction fee is the real revenue of the protocol. Although the current project's annualized P/E is only 4.17, the token price has reached $186, and Unibot protocol income would still decline further. Therefore it is no longer a good time for investment at this stage.

♦ Risks of the bots mainly include security risks, such as robot access to private keys, data leakage or attacks leading to asset loss, thus limiting the size of capital that the ecosystem can accommodate; in addition, bots rely on algorithms and historical data to make trading decisions, and have a slower reaction time to sudden changes or unexpected events in the market, which may result in decision-making errors and investment losses. Users need to exercise caution when using these applications.

Report Outline

1、Landscape Overview

2. Analysis of Representative Projects

2.1 Unibot

2.2 Maestro Bots

2.3 Banana Gun

3、Potential Risks

4、Summary

1. Landscape Overview

Telegram bots are essentially automated scripts that respond to specific commands sent or keywords triggered by users in Telegram chats, and are typically built on APIs provided by cryptocurrency exchanges, market data aggregators, or custom trading algorithms.Telegram bots interact with these APIs to obtain data, execute trades, and provide information to users. The main functions on the defi side include trading, sniping, copy trading, airdrop farming, etc. The user experience is better, and simple functions can be realized directly through the mobile terminal, and the operating steps are easier compared to other defi apps, which is very appealing to defi users. In addition, Telegram's monthly active users have exceeded 800 million, and low-threshold defi bots are very likely to introduce new users to the crypto space.

According to data reported by Binance Research, the cumulative cryptocurrency trading volume associated with Telegram bots has exceeded $190 million as of early August 2023; on July 23, the daily trading volume of cryptocurrencies backed by bots hit an all-time high of $10 million, with more than 6,000 unique users per day. The growing popularity of meme coins in recent months contribute a lot to the rise bots. Meme coins have become the story of overnight riches, and the smart money wallet addresses that have made a hundred or even a thousand times the amount of coins have also been sought after, and the low-net-worth players hope to analyze the historical trading behavior of meme coins by searching for such wallet addresses and imitate them in the future. Telegram bots fulfill this need by allowing users to quickly access token information, accurately snipe meme coins, monitor smart money wallet addresses across the web, and providing one-click followers to copy trades. In addition, to address the pain points in the transaction process such as transaction speed, transaction slippage and MEV attacks, Telegram bots provide limit orders, custom slippage, private transactions and other functions to achieve faster speed and avoid transactions by sandwich attacks.

1.1 Typical Use Cases

• Providing real-time market data and news: Telegram cryptobots are one of the sources of information for users, providing real-time updates on cryptocurrency prices, market trends, and breaking news events. These bots make it easy for users to access information efficiently and stay up-to-date without having to navigate through multiple websites or apps.

• Trading Signals and Analysis: Many Telegram bots are designed to provide trading signals and technical analysis to help users make informed trading decisions. By analyzing market indicators and price patterns, these robots can help traders identify potential entry and exit points.

• Portfolio Management: Telegram bots can provide portfolio tracking features that allow users to monitor holdings, evaluate profits and losses, and receive performance reports.

• Peer-to-peer trading: Some Telegram bots enable peer-to-peer (P2P) cryptocurrency trading within Telegram, which allows users to buy and sell cryptocurrencies directly to each other, eliminating the need for intermediaries such as exchanges.

• Payment services: Telegram bots also facilitate cryptocurrency payments and transactions, and companies can integrate these bots into their own Telegram channels or groups to receive payments for products or services offered.

1.2 Steps to set up a bot

Step 1: Create Bot: Developers can use the BotFather tool to create bots on Telegram, generating the API tokens needed for the bot to run;

Step 2: Integrate APIs, bot developers integrate APIs from cryptocurrency exchanges or other relevant sources to access real-time market data and execute trades;

Step 3: Command mapping, where the developer defines specific commands that the bot can recognize and respond to, e.g., "/price BTC" might trigger the bot to fetch the current price of Bitcoin;

Step 4: User authorization, some advanced bots may require users to authorize their exchange accounts to enable trading or portfolio management functionality.

1.3 Business Performance

The recent trigger for the pipeline has been Unibot which, according to CoinMarketCap, accounted for more than 70% of the overall track's total market capitalization as of August 14th.

According to Dune's data, as of August 14th, the DEX bots had 78,238 unique users, with a total transaction volume of $265,299,823, and 449,162 transactions have been completed. Among them, the number of users of the pioneering project Maestro, which was established back in June 2022 but has always had less than 1k users, has grown all the way up to 5k+ since March this year; followed by Unibot, whose number of users soared to 1.5k+ in July since the project was established in May this year.

From the perspective of daily trading volume, the top ranked is Unibot, followed by Banana Gun. The peak appeared on July 23 with the total daily trading volume of more than $10 million, of which Unibot's daily trading volume amounted to $7.6 million. Now the trading volume has dropped back after a rapid rise, and today's total daily trading volume has fallen back to about $5.8 million.

In terms of trades, the gap between Unibot and second-ranked Banana Gun isn't quite wide, with Unibot currently at 7,585 daily trades compared to Banana Gun's 6,976.

1.4 Protocol Revenue

There are two dominant ways in which DEX bots convert adoption rates into agreement revenues. One is by charging a percentage fee on each transaction, and the other is by charging a purchase or sales tax on each purchase or sale transaction involving the bot's native tokens. As you can see, simply looking at the protocol revenue numbers does not give a true picture of the size of the project's transaction volume, the analysis of which will be detailed in the analysis of Unibot below. According to Binance Research, the cumulative total agreement revenue for the DEX bot track has now reached $28.7M, with Maestro's cumulative agreement revenue a distant second in the track at around $8M.

The following section provides a specific analysis of the raceway faucet projects.

2. Analysis of Representative Projects

2.1 Unibot

2.1.1 Project Introduction

Unibot is a bot project that provides Defi trading on Telegram, released on ethereum on May 17, 2023, and aims to provide the fastest Uniswap sniping service, allowing DeFi users to buy and sell tokens on Uniswap V3 directly through Telegram. More specifically, Unibot is Diamond Protocol's LLP platform for Uniswap V3. Since its launch in May 2023, the platform has become hugely popular, with the number of users and transactions rising dramatically in a short period of time. According to the official website, it is 6 times faster than Uniswap, with a total volume of $173,484,372. Users can try it out for free, but each purchase and sale transaction is subject to a secondary 1% transaction fee on top of the Uniswap transaction fee. The ultra-fast speed of Unibot is due to its advanced algorithms and robust infrastructure, including private nodes for sniping, private trading options for buying and selling tokens, wallet monitoring, and a token tracker.UNIBOT's tools include:

• Fast buying and selling platform;

• Mirror sniping, which enables users to copy transactions from other wallets;

• Token release channel, which provides real-time information about newly deployed tokens;

• Method sniping, which allows users to enter 3 token addresses to snipe at release;

• Multi-wallet management and PNL analysis of the value of tokens held by users.

Unibot highlights mainly include:

• The use of interface is beginner friendly and easy to operate, users can complete the transaction through the mobile Telegram;

• Unibot has private nodes, which accelerates the transaction speed, improves the transaction efficiency, and improves the user experience closer to a centralized product.

2.1.2 Team and Financing

Unibot is an anonymous team, with the only known information being that its founder Ayden previously worked at Apple, and the other founder works for a machine learning startup based in the Bay Area of California. A crypto VC, Theia Blockchain, is known to have invested in Unibot, but the exact amount of the investment was not disclosed.

2.1.3 Tokenomics

Unibot's native token is UNIBOT, with a maximum supply of 1,000,000 tokens, and the project was launched with all tokens in full circulation without dilution, and the tokens are used to pay for transaction fees and to receive rewards from holders. The price trend since the token's launch is shown below:

According to feixiaohao, on August 15, the number of UNIBOT token holding addresses is 5,840. The top 100 token addresses accounted for more than 50% ,among which addresses holding positions of more than 1% are 12, which shows that whales still have a strong control over the tokens.

The project levies a 5% tax on UNIBOT token transactions, of which 1% goes to the LP , 1-2% is allocated to token holders, and the remaining 2% is used for team and operational expenses. Holding 10 or more UNIBOT tokens (no pledge required) entitles holders to the following benefits:

• A 20% reduction in commission for swaps traded through Unibot;

• Enjoy a revenue share that includes 40% of the bot's transaction fees, and 1% of the UNIBOT Token transaction tax, and 2% of the token transaction tax for those who participate in the token migration before September;

• Access to the Unibot Telegram holder channel where alpha can be discussed, new features proposed and access to a dedicated support channel. The more UNIBOT tokens you hold, the more rewards you can receive.

2.1.4 Business Performance

Transaction Data Unibot trading volume peaked at $7.63M on July 23rd, and the average daily trading volume has dropped back to $4.6M in the last 7 days.

In terms of the source of trading volume, the top pair is UNIBOT-WETH, which is 3.4 times the volume of the second-place pair. Excluding the UNIBOT pair, the RLB-WETH pair accounted for 42.7% of the trading volume, and RLB is the native token of Rollbit Lottery; in addition, there are also mainstream and meme coins such as $BITCOIN, $jim, $COCO, which shows that Unibot is indeed suitable for tapping into new and popular projects, but it is not yet known if such tokens can bring trading volume to Unibot on a sustainable basis. However, it is not yet known whether such tokens can continue to bring trading volume to Unibot.

User Data

As of August 14, the cumulative number of unique users of the project reached 9,954, and the number of daily active users was 1,584. The user data began to surge after mid-July, and it still remains at a high level.

Protocol Revenue

The peak of the protocol fee appeared on July 23, with a single-day protocol revenue of 337.54 ETH, while the protocol revenue on August 13 had fallen to 61.14 ETH, a drop of more than 80%.

As for the composition of the protocol revenue, the bot transaction fee on July 23 was 38.42 ETH, and about 300 ETH of the fee was generated by the UNIBOT token transaction tax, which accounted for 89% of the total fee; the current tax revenue still accounts for 67% of the revenue, and the transaction fee accounted for only 33% of the fee.

In summary, the vast majority of the previous protocol revenue comes from the transaction tax, which reflects the speculative behavior of the UNIBOT token and is not sustainable. Due to the recent decline in the proportion of taxes, the protocol revenue has also shown a downward trend, while the bot transaction fees are the real income of the protocol, although the growth rate has accelerated since August, it still can't inhibit the downward trend of the project's revenue. The author believes that although the current project annualized P/E is only 4.17, but the token price has reached as high as $186, and the Unibot protocol revenue will still further decline, this stage is not a good time to enter the investment.

2.2 Maestro Bots

2.2.1 Project Introduction

Maestro Bots is a Telegram-based set of defi robots, founded in July 2022, mainly including multi-chain (BSC + ETH) sniper robot, wallet tracker and whale bot. The overall function is similar to Unibot. In addition to the basic functions of trading, mirror sniping and copying transactions, its special features include:

• Support for multi-chain transactions, including BSC, ETH and ARB;

• Receive instant notifications of whale transactions directly on Telegram, and Whale/Wallet Watch can notify users of large changes in wallets they wish to follow;

• The ability to track wallets right in Telegram with quick price alerts, and the ability to view cryptocurrency balances in BSC and ETH wallets at any time without switching apps or leaving Telegram;

• Maestro Buy Bot allows users to monitor the buying, selling and price changes of up to two tokens for free. Providing the cryptocurrency community with the right tools at high speed, versatility and accessibility. In terms of business model, Maestro Bots charge a 1% transaction fee for each transaction, and has also launched a $200/month VIP community service - Premium Sub, which allows you to get some "wealth codes" after entering the VIP community. After entering the VIP community, you can get some "wealth codes", access to faster robots and simulators and other more powerful features and tools. Currently, Maestro has not yet issued coins, and there is no revenue sharing or referral reward for users.

2.2.2 Team

Maestro Bots is developed by Gearlay Technologies Inc. The team is located in Canada and currently consists of four members, including two developers responsible for maintaining and updating the product, a marketer, and a designer/community manager responsible for providing information to users and collecting feedback.Gealay mainly provides BaaS (Bots-as-a Service) services and provides developers with a robot SDK . The disclosed member information is Abbas Abou Daya, the founder, with extensive past work experience in the development field.

2.2.3 Business Performance

User Data

According to Dune's statistics, the number of users of the project was 2,931 on August 14, although the project has been established for more than a year, the number of users did not exceed 1,000 on a single day before May this year until April 2023. The number of users began to surge, with the highest point appearing at 3,699 on May 22, and it has been maintained in the range of 2k-3k so far with 90% from ethereum. Much of the reason for the large increase in users comes from the fact that Unibot has sparked the bot venue, allowing Maestro Bots to get back in the spotlight as well, and the fact that it has yet to coin, drawing continued attention from speculators.

Protocol Revenues

Since Maestro Bots does not have incentives or revenue sharing rewards for its users, all fees collected by the Agreement become revenue directly. According to Defi Llama, as of August 14, 2023, the cumulative revenue from the Protocol is $18.85M, with a significant increase in revenue starting in May of this year, in line with the growth trend in the number of users, which is around $1M per week.

In summary, Maestro Bots product features are more complete, and the number of users and protocol revenue are still maintained at a high level.

2.3 Banana Gun

2.3.1 Project Introduction

Banana Gun is also a Telegram bot, the project was just established in June this year. Main features include sniping upcoming tokens and purchasing tokens that are already online, and it only supports Ethereum at the moment.Banana Gun Bot divides its services into two different levels, level 1 services are more limited, such as manual purchases, and it will charge a 0.5% transaction fee; and level 2 services charge a 0.85% transaction fee, including more advanced features such as automatic sniping. The product features a user-friendly interface with anti-rug function. There is no revenue sharing on fees, and referral rewards are only open for some KOLs.

2.3.2 Business Performance

Transaction Data

As of August 16th, Banana Gun's transaction volume reached $83,698,214, with an average daily transaction volume of $1,115,976, with the peak occurring on August 4th, when the daily transaction volume reached $4M, and the average number of transactions per day was 2,674. The volume indicator is second only to Unibot in the Telegram Bots track, but the gap is relatively large.

User Data

Banana Gun has 438 daily active users and 6,254 cumulative users, which is a gap compared to Unibot and Maestro bots. Nearly 80% of the project's users are returning users, with intermittent growth in new users.

Protocol Revenue

As of August 15, Banana Gun generated a total of 263.95 ETH in transaction fee revenue, which is about $481,708, with an average daily transaction fee revenue of $6,512. Such a low income is due to its low rates as well as low daily users.

In summary, Banana Gun launched late, the product design interface and features are similar to Unibot, and has not yet issued tokens. It is still doubtful whether its product features and the future price of tokens can beat up Unibot. In the case of the current hot Telegram bot venue, short-term speculation can be appropriately concerned.

3. Potential Risks

Telegram bot tools in the pursuit of transaction speed and ease of use at the same time, may sacrifice security and privacy protection. Potential risks should not be ignored.

Some bots' smart contracts have not yet passed security audits or have been exposed to many problems during audits. For example, Quantstamp's security audit of UniBot found a number of security issues and risks, including exchange calculation problems, vulnerability to sandwich attacks, lack of re-entry protection, solvency dependent on the keeper, and a lack of checking and logging of variable updates. Additionally, bots accessing private keys when users create a new wallet or connect to an existing wallet can be risky, and although bots claim to delete private keys after configuration is complete, there is no way to determine if the private key has actually been deleted, and a data breach or attack could have disastrous consequences for bot users, resulting in the loss of assets to hackers. Addressing these issues is critical to improving the security of bot use, and users need to exercise caution when using these applications. To be on the safe side, users can connect a separate wallet for the bot and transfer only small amounts of money. Additionally, some fraudsters use bots for criminal activities, such as malicious actors creating fake bots to steal users' funds or personal information. Users are advised to only use bots from trusted sources and to double-check the legitimacy of bots before authorizing access to any account.

Additionally, because Telegram bots typically require users to provide account access in order to perform portfolio management or trading, privacy protections may not be favorable. While most legitimate bots prioritize security, users should exercise caution before granting access. And bots, which rely on algorithms and historical data to make trading decisions, are slow to react to sudden market changes or unforeseen events, which may result in poor decision-making and investment losses.

We can see from the roadmaps of some bot projects the measures and solutions the projects have taken or plan to take to address the above risks.

• Open source: Telegram bots should be open source and security vetted, so that users can learn about the bot's trading strategy or jerk airdrop strategy through the code rather than the project's description;

• Enhanced security: Telegram bot is in dire need of measures to protect private keys to build a more secure operating environment, such as the use of MPC (Multiparty Computing) technology when storing private keys and signing transactions.

4.Final Thoughts

Undeniably, Telegram bot has become an important part of the crypto community, providing users with convenient and efficient crypto services. At this stage, Telegram bot is very suitable to become a powerful tool for degen players, which facilitates users to complete crypto transactions and investments on the mobile side, and the UI design sector is friendly to beginners, which is helpful to attract non-native crypto users to try to enter the crypto field. However, the track is still at a very early stage. It is difficult to judge where the venue is going and whether it will continue to be explosive. More Telegram users need to be converted into Telegram bot users in the future. At this stage, the main contributor to the transaction volume of the track is Unibot, other projects with more serious homogenization of functions and the moat is weak.$UNIBOT price has reached a high level, and now is not a good time to buy-in, and other robotic projects that have not issued tokens can be focused on short-term if they take advantage of the trend. And the potential security risks of Telegram robots will also limit the size of the funds that can be accommodated. Users must pay attention to the risks of Telegram bots, do a good job of back-testing, and remain vigilant against potential scams, and at this stage the robotics track is not mature enough under the premise of not recommended to invest a large amount of money in trading.