DEX Traders Turn To Telegram Bots To Gain An Edge

DeFi degens are increasingly using Telegram-based bots to quickly buy new tokens as they launch, set limit orders, and copy other traders’ moves.

The total number of users has jumped past 89,000, according to a dashboard tracking the ‘DEX Trading Bot Wars.’ Daily active users crossed the 7,000 mark last week and continue to trend higher.

Telegram bots use the popular messaging app as an interface to facilitate onchain trades on decentralized exchanges like Uniswap.

The pseudonymous whale_hunter, whose Dune dashboards on bots are extremely popular, thinks the user experience is attracting both experienced and novice users.

“You can onboard newbies simply by sending them a link on Telegram,” they told The Defiant. “They can start playing around and dive deeper later.”

The bots work for crypto veterans as well, said whale_hunter. “[Experienced users] have the ability to react faster to market volatility, without running home, open pc, open metamask, go to uniswap, swap,” they said.

The rising popularity of the bots highlights the clunkiness of current solutions — many crypto users not only need to confirm every transaction with a wallet like MetaMask, but they often use hardware wallets as an additional layer of security.

Compare that to typing a few commands in Telegram, where traders and investors are often already sharing crypto news and advice, and trading bots built into the messaging application have some clear advantages.

Exposed Private Keys

These trading bots require access to a user's private keys in order to function, something that goes against DeFi's mantra of self-custody.

However, allowing services at least partial access to private keys has been a growing trend in crypto as the bear market grinds on — Synthetix founder Kain Warwick launched an exchange last month that made use of users’ private keys in an effort to provide an in-app experience comparable to Binance or Coinbase.

To be sure, those advantages come at a cost — users are compromising the security of their assets in order to transact so quickly. Private keys are used to sign off on transactions, and anyone with access to the keys can potentially drain the wallet.

Banana Gun, a project that develops a bot for “sniping” new tokens as they launch, has been gaining popularity in recent months and has a roughly 25% market share.

Democratized Sniping

Rancune, who works on the Banana Gun team, sees the app as making a strategy once only available to the technically proficient, available to all.

“What happened this year is that sniping finally has been democratized,” they told The Defiant. “Earlier on, it was just the happy few sniping with custom bots.”

DeFi traders are always trying to snag the next hot memecoin, a space in crypto which has been hot this year. “There's so many tokens deployed daily,” said Rancune. “If you're good at it you don't necessarily need a PEPE.”

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The Defiant

PEPE reached a $1.5B market capitalization less than a month after launching earlier this year.