Memecoin Trading Bot Maestro is Raking in Millions

One of the “shovels” emerging from the memecoin trading fad is a Telegram bot that’s reaping in millions.

The bot, called Maestro,  has captured roughly $4.5M in trading fees so far this month, more than triple its total fees for the previous month, according to DeFi Llama. Fee revenue in May also beat out fees generated since its launch last July until the start of May by 32%.

With the Maestro team reaping rewards regardless of their customers’ profitability, some onlookers have likened the trading bot to shovel vendors amid the 19th-century gold rush.

The fee revenue is derived from a steep 1% tax Maestro imposes on every successful buy or sell order executed through its app. Fees are automatically taken from a user’s balance once the balance owed exceeds 0.01 BNB or ETH. 

While users can create a dedicated wallet for the app, they also have the option of connecting an existing wallet. If the user picks the latter, the app will ask for the user to share their private key or seed phrase, a very risky practice. The Defiant urges all readers to never expose their seed phrase to a third-party entity.

While asking for users’ seed phrases has garnered criticism, not everybody is skeptical.

“This might be a real on-chain business (dex sh*tcoin tooling), unlike all the worthless DeFi protocols that either shut down or have founders relaxing somewhere low-cost and tropical spending investor funds slowly,” said 0xSisyphus, a popular web3 influencer.

Memecoin Resurgence

Memecoins exploded in popularity in recent weeks, ushering a return to the risk-embracing trading culture that proliferated amid the notorious dog-token trading frenzy of early 2021.

PEPE, a tokenized tribute to a cartoon frog, rocketed to a market cap of $1.5B after listing on Binance at the start of the month. Investors have even piled into memecoins concocted by ChatGPT, and sent $7M to the personal ENS domain of a memecoin creator in a pre-sale offering no smart contract-based security assurances.

The memecoin market resurgence has also accelerated Ethereum’s burn rate amid increased competition for block space. This month, the network destroyed more than 56% of all ETH burned since The Merge in September, according to Ultra Sound Money.

Memecoins represent a combined market cap of $16.7B.

Maestro supports trading on Uniswap and PancakeSwap’s Ethereum, BNB Chain, and Arbitrum deployments, but more than 90% of its fee revenue is derived from trades executed on Ethereum.

Its main product is its “sniper bot,” which allows users to invest in ERC-20 tokens the moment they launch on a decentralized exchange. Maestro also offers tools for portfolio tracking, and flagging and copying trades executed by other users.