Banana X : When we started working on the public bot a year ago, it was initially meant as a tool for friends, giving them access to one of the best tools on Ethereum at the time. But we figured bundling snipers together enabled small guys to compete for the same blocks that used to be dominated by a few big guys, making things more fair. Banana Gun was born.
Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much. Banana Gun grew rapidly, mainly by word of mouth. Because the success of the tool heavily depended on usage by our users, we always felt like we should be a protocol of the community. We were convinced that as long as you build something good, it's possible to create something where users, holders, and the team can eat from the same pie.
Therefore, we carefully crafted our tokenomics and held no private rounds or seed rounds. We rejected every OTC request from VCs and locked team tokens up for a long time. No stringing users along with endless point programs or airdrops. We chose the way of Banana Bonus, where we reward bot users with liquid tokens.
The launch happened, and we botched it up. We were so focused on having the perfect launch with the perfect distribution that our token contract had an obvious bug that was missed by many. The worst two weeks of our lives ensued, where we ensured we made everyone whole using our own funds, while Banana Gun was fudded hard. It was nearly impossible to show people we had the right intentions.
Nonetheless, we kept on building. Slowly and steadily, we captured volume on Ethereum, primarily by innovating hard, being the first with many features, and making sure we had the best tech. Also, because of the 24/7 manned support chat, where you get personal in-depth service from our friendly mods.
The Bananalympics were held in November 2023, a crazy and exciting event where the best traders showcased their trading skills by running 1 ETH up to just short of $1M. In January, we reached our milestone of $1B volume while deploying the first version of the Solana bot. We added Base and Blast chains, upgraded our back-end to keep up with our growth, upgraded our brand identity, and closed many partnerships.
And here we are now. A Binance listing. "Wen Binance?" "Now Binance." For many protocols, this is the end station, the final boss.
This is where we feel we're just starting.
Now that our token is accessible to anyone, be it a normie or a degen with a Milady PFP, now that all eyes are on us, we feel we are ready to accelerate.
Time to close this chapter and open the next. A chapter with a Solana Reborn bot, rebuilt from the ground up. One with a webapp, where traders don't have to resort to Telegram to get the Banana Gun experience. One with a public API, where people can integrate their own dapps and bots with Banana Gun.
Thank you to everyone who had faith in us, who has supported us so far, and who will build together with us in the future. We couldn't do it without you.