The market's enthusiasm for political election coins has waned, and the main attention of the cryptocurrency circle has returned to Binance. Binance has listed Banana Gun, which may be one of the biggest news today.
Just after its seventh anniversary, Binance launched a new airdrop reward program for BNB holders, Binance HODLer Airdrops. The community is speculating on what kind of projects can represent the image of "small and medium-sized projects with good fundamentals, organic community foundation, and sustainable business model" proposed by Binance.
What many people didn’t expect was that Binance chose Banana Gun as the first HODLer Airdrops project. I saw many people asking on Twitter why Binance listed Banana Gun? There were even rumors that Binance had acquired Banana Gun.
After the announcement, the price of Banana Gun rose, and some people who had held BANANA for a long time finally saw the light of day. In fact, BANANA has risen by more than 50% in the past week, and the price of the currency has risen nearly 7 times since 2024.
But after communicating and thinking with more friends, I found that there is a more important "layout" behind this: the trading platform may have found the next profit opportunity, which is a new growth market, that is, trading BOT.
“Off-chain brokers” are eyeing “on-chain brokers”
This year, several major events occurred in the cryptocurrency circle. One of them was that Binance paid a sky-high fine of $4.3 billion in order to let the US regulators off the hook. The $4.3 billion fine is the largest fine in the history of Chinese entrepreneurship and one of the highest fines among global Internet giants. The biggest challenge facing Binance, whose "treasury" was plundered, is how to recover quickly.
Not only Binance, but all major trading platforms have their own difficulties and have come up with completely different solutions. Some have made large-scale layoffs to increase revenue and reduce expenditure, some have earned transaction fees by frequently listing contract coins, some have seized the pricing power of the crypto market by becoming the "largest coin holding address", and some have controlled the market by listing small currencies...
But what is the same is that all CEXs are looking for the next incremental market.
Last year, the only incremental market was Bitcoin ecosystem inscriptions. Unfortunately, due to regulatory entanglement, Binance had no time to take care of it and almost missed the share of this incremental market, making OKX lose.
After realizing this, Binance used another fastest way to overtake and make up for its lack in the inscription sector, that is, to spend money. On July 4 this year, according to official news from UniSat, it had completed its Pre-A round of financing in May this year, led by Binance, and the specific amount of financing has not yet been disclosed.
After suffering losses in the inscription track, Binance's response speed in new markets has improved. For example, they quickly launched the god disk BOME. However, it was also because of this that Binance was criticized badly. But making money is not shabby. In the first three days after the launch of BOME, the transaction volume of BOME/USDT trading pair on Binance was 990 million, 985 million and 962 million US dollars respectively.
Although it was criticized, Binance has already tasted the sweetness of BOME, and seems to be more convinced that meme is the next incremental market. Related reading: "BOME created a market value of 1.5 billion US dollars in three days, breaking the defense of the crypto industry"
More money is flowing to "on-chain brokers"
Starting with the phenomenal BOME, no one will doubt the potential of the meme market anymore.
It turns out that meme coins have taken up a considerable share of the Binance trading market. Among the top ten cryptocurrencies in the 24-hour trading volume rankings on the Binance platform ten days ago, half were MEME tokens, including PEPE, DOGE, NOT, WIF, and BONK. The total trading volume of these five meme coins reached 3.454 billion, which is far more than BNB and even SOL.
Meme coins contribute considerable liquidity to Binance, but the real meme market is still beyond Binance's reach.
On the one hand, it is difficult for most meme coins to develop a large enough trading volume and a market value of over 100 million. Being listed on an exchange is an unattainable goal for most meme coins.
On the other hand, not every meme coin culture is as interesting and harmless as WIF and BOME. For example, TRUMP, which has a peak market value of nearly $800 million, and FIGHT, which has attracted nearly $150 million in trading volume in 5 days, are meme coins related to political stances that have become popular this year, but it is difficult for Binance to directly participate.
Owning several leading meme coins does not allow Binance to sit back and relax, because the on-chain returns are so tempting.
A month ago, He Yi expressed a similar view on Twitter: "Even if Binance doesn't list these projects, they still exist, and trading volume and funds will be diverted to the corners of the entire industry. In addition to the unlocking of VC-invested projects, Meme coins, on-chain coin-slinging, Ponzi schemes will also be diverted."
According to analysis by cryptocurrency market data firm CCData, high-volume exchanges like Binance and Bybit have seen a cumulative increase of 11.6% in the number of new token listings, to 2,066. The situation is even more massive on decentralized exchanges like Uniswap, where more than a million memecoin-like tokens have been issued this year.
How fat is the TGbot track?
Compared to traders who realize profits through buying and selling but need to bear greater risks, the risk-return ratio earned by BOTs who "sell water around gold mines" is much smaller.
If TGbot was still a "niche track" last year, following the increasingly frequent meme craze, TGbot has become a one-stop mature trading platform that crypto degen users cannot do without, providing copy trading, data analysis, cross-chain assets, etc.
After BOME ignited the peak of MEME during that period, the total revenue of various BOTs exceeded US$5.33 million.
Let’s look at more recent data. Last month, the monthly trading volume on Banana Gun reached $740 million, with revenue of $4.64 million. Two weeks ago, Banana Gun announced that it had achieved a trading volume of $5 billion. The huge trading volume combined with the “cash cow” profit model allows Banana Gun to easily “earn money without doing anything.”
From Dune, we can see that during the peak of the meme market, Banana Gun’s daily income was as high as $200,000. Even in the recent market downturn and sluggish market, the daily income is still around $70,000.
What does it mean to earn $200,000 a day? In the protocol revenue rankings of the crypto market, Banana Gun is often in the top 10, while the old wallet leader MetaMask ranks 12th, and the classic DeFi project Curve Finance and Solana ecosystem leader DEX Raydium rank 14th and 15th respectively.
I feel a little sad that those third-tier trading platforms that work hard to attract users and optimize product experience may not earn as much as a TGbot.
The 16th place is BONKBOT, a trading tool transformed from a meme in the Solana ecosystem, whose daily income has recently stabilized at around US$80,000.
As early as February this year, research firm Delphi Digital analyzed the profit mechanism and growth space of TGbots such as Maestro, UniBot and Banana Gun in a report titled "Telegram Bots: Evaluating Crypto's New Cash Cows".
Delphi Digital concluded that TGbot’s business model is similar to that of on-chain wallets, and the best competitor in this field is Metamask Swaps, which charges 0.875% on each transaction, while Banana Gun charges 1% on each automated transaction.
The fierce competition in the wallet market is a story that happened a few years ago. TGbot has a similar business model to on-chain wallets, with higher commissions, but it does not need to go through the long-term polishing and iteration process that every wallet product has to go through.
In fact, BananaGun’s weekly trading volume has surpassed that of Bonkbot and Metamask, reaching $137.5 million. Delphi Digital calculated the market value and price of BANANA in a bull market, predicting that it would reach $65 in a bull market, a goal that was achieved last night.
The TGbot track has been developed for a year. Although it is not a brand new track, most people still underestimate its market capacity.
I also noticed that not only Binance, but other CEXs have also begun to reach out to BOT. More than a month ago, the Bitget copy trading section announced the "first" inheritance of the Telegram signal robot, providing platform users with the function of copying tgbot.
BOT can earn millions of dollars every day through on-chain transaction fees, which does threaten CEX (centralized exchanges). In my opinion, in addition to making a trading BOT yourself, "turning enemies into friends" and acquiring or investing in a leading BOT is also a very good choice, so today's rumors about Binance acquiring BananaGun may not be "groundless".
With this question in mind, BlockBeats used the company's largest network to confirm the authenticity of the rumor of "acquiring BananaGun" with Yijie, but her answer was different from what I expected. "Binance did not acquire BananaGun, it just listed the coin," He Yi replied to us.
