Author: defioasis

The Telegram trading robot (TG Bot) has emerged as a force in the recently sluggish market environment. Coingecko has launched a TG Bot section, and related TG Bot concept tokens have soared dozens or even hundreds of times in just a few weeks. As of August 4, Coingecko data shows that the current TG Bot track has a total market value of 186 million US dollars, of which Unibot, the industry leader, accounts for about 75% of the market share. In the last quarter, the UNIBOT token has increased by at least 50 times. Despite the recent popularity of TG Bot concept tokens, such plugin-like robots have long existed in Telegram, Discord, or even WeChat.

Trading bot User Experience

As a TG Bot for trading purposes, it will develop without deviating from the user’s trading habits and some features of DEX, providing a more comfortable user experience in trading based on DEX. Currently, TG Bot mainly serves Meme players who pursue high returns and high risks. For such players, the trading robot will adapt different functions around the pre-, mid-, and post-trading phases.

The first is to obtain firsthand information about Memecoins before trading. There are two aspects to this. One is the token level, where the TG Bot will monitor the birth of a new coin from multiple dimensions, such as pool size, celebrity release, low/high tax, LP lock-up time, old wallet purchase quantity, etc. The other is the operation of Smart Money, where the TG Bot will monitor high-winning wallets with the characteristics of “risking little to win big” across the network and provide a one-click copy function.

After obtaining firsthand information, if you choose to trade in TG Bot, you can either import your wallet or recharge the wallet generated by TG Bot, generally the latter. During the trading process, there are three pain points: trading speed, trading slippage, and MEV attacks. To address these, TG Bot will provide some functions, such as a sniper feature for newly issued tokens, providing limit orders, customizing slippage, and using TG Bot’s private node trading to achieve faster response speed and avoid sandwich arbitrage attacks.

After the trade is completed, some TG Bots will also provide profit/loss calculations and analysis for user addresses.

TG Bot Profit Model

There are roughly four ways for TG Bot to make a profit.

① Membership fee system, i.e., a certain fee needs to be paid before using the robot, with prices around 0.1 ETH for one month and 1 ETH for one year. This model is relatively private and community-oriented, suitable for KOLs who can rally loyal users, and it could even be a startup project born from a Meme group.

② Free trial, but transaction tax is collected, represented by Unibot. Unibot charges a 1% fee for each transaction, which is a secondary charge on top of Uniswap’s transaction fees. However, Unibot distributes 40% of the fees to its token holders. Therefore, as a user and a holder of the token, a relatively benign relationship can be formed. Currently, Unibot has approximately 1,000–1,500 daily active users, but the fees captured are not inferior to some major protocols.

③ A combination of transaction tax and membership system, represented by Maestro. Maestro’s overall functionality is very similar to Unibot’s, also charging a 1% fee for each transaction, but it has not yet issued tokens, and all fees are accounted for as protocol income. In addition, it has launched a $200 per month VIP community service. After joining the VIP community, one can access carefully selected Smart Money addresses or wealth passwords.

④ Holding a certain number of tokens allows free use of the trading robot.

Factors behind the Popularity

The recent popularity of TG Bot could be a successful story of on-chain marketing and grassroots counterattack. Whenever a certain Memecoin becomes popular, CT is very keen on finding those Smart Money wallets, looking for wallets that have made hundreds or thousands of times returns with small investments, and then analyzing the historical behavior of those wallet addresses to imitate and copy. TG Bot undoubtedly fits this need very well. Coupled with the fact that Telegram itself is essential social software for Crypto, integrating trading and social interaction, marketing and propagation of on-chain addresses become very convenient.

On the other hand, the fundamental reason why low-net-worth players do not chase mainstream coins but are keen on Memecoins is to accumulate wealth in a short time, especially under the stimulus of so many get-rich-quick stories. Successful Memecoins are largely about creating a fair environment, conveying an anti-VC philosophy. Similarly, the down-to-earth TG Bot for fighting “soil dogs” is based on the commonly used social software Telegram. Coupled with the exposure of data websites like Coingecko, DeFiLlama, etc. to TG Bot, the fees captured surpass those of VC projects valued at billions of dollars. The players using it will be proud of this, viewing TG Bot Token as another form of Meme, with the idea of a grassroots counterattack embedded within. Of course, it is undeniable that the TG Bot project team is also deliberately or unintentionally catering to such narratives.

Opportunities and Risks

Currently, the TG Bot track is still at a very early stage, and the whole track is only at the level of hundreds of millions of dollars, and it still focuses on trading functions. In the future, it may develop the robot from trading functions to more diverse ones, even achieving aggregation. Moreover, to develop longer-term, users must be made to form a habit of using TG for chat and TG for trading at the same time, converting TG users into TG Bot users.

But at the same time, the risks of TG Bot are also very clear. Its moat is relatively weak, and the functions are relatively homogeneous. To maintain long-term competitiveness, the project team needs to carry out continuous function iterations and updates. Newcomers to the TG Bot are more likely to start with transaction fees, engaging in a “price war”. The second is safety issues, including wallet security and token security. Importing a wallet into TG Bot or generating a wallet can’t guarantee that the private key won’t leak, which restricts the size of the funds that the track can accommodate. TG Bot can’t confirm the security of newly born token contracts and token models, as was the case with PNDX, launched by Pauly, the founder of the NFT market Not Larva Labs. The contract had a flaw, and the model required minting on the official website, but TG Bot couldn’t detect either of these, leading to users who bought through TG Bot becoming liquidity providers for others.

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