Hyped Banana Token Launch Wrecked By Contract Bug

The team behind the Banana Gun trading bot is planning to relaunch its token after a botched launch.

BANANA went live yesterday and surged to a $70M market capitalization in less than an hour — the token has since dropped to nearly zero after the team discovered a bug in the smart contract.

As part of their recovery, the team sold the BANANA tokens held in the project’s treasury to drain the BANANA/ETH liquidity pool on Uniswap. The Banana Gun team has said that it has taken a snapshot of affected users and plans to compensate them.

BANANA is designed to be an asset which shares the revenue generated by Banana Gun, which is a Telegram-based trading bot. These bots have been one of crypto’s bright spots this year.

Inflationary Taxes

The launch of BANANA was spoiled by a buggy implementation of a 4% fee on transfers.

Of that fee, 2% is supposed to go to other BANANA holders, 1% to the team and 1% to the project’s treasury. Instead, the team miscoded the token such that the tax would accrue as designed, but another 4% of tokens would also be minted and sent to the person who initiated the transfer. This means that the supply of BANANA was set to increase every time anyone transferred the token.

The Banana Gun team did not immediately respond to The Defiant’s request for comment.

The incident has sucked the life out of a promising project in a hot subsector of the digital asset space — Banana Gun is responsible for 62% of Telegram bot trades as of Sept. 11, according to a Dune Analytics dashboard. The trading bot space as a whole just recently passed 100,000 users as well.

Now, instead of a successful token launch, the team is dealing with widespread community backlash, with many wondering how the audit missed such a critical bug.

Unibot Rallies

The bug doesn’t appear to have soured the broader market for Telegram bots — UNIBOT, the token of a competing Telegram bot, has jumped nearly 15% in the past 24 hours as traders place their bets elsewhere. Unibot facilitates just under a quarter of bot trades.

Banana Gun raised 800 ETH, worth roughly $1.2M, through its presale. According to dealer, a self-described analyst, 800 wallets received presale allocations of BANANA.

Dealer noted that roughly 500 of the 800 wallets sold within the first hour, netting a cool 10,000% profit.