Banana Gun Bot 🍌🔫 – Know Your Customer

by being the owner of every wallet on Ethirium

Apin’ Penguins

In early August, shitcoiners observed the flopped debut of a hyped token named $PENGY.

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Hyped launches are like blood in the water for sharks, drawing attention from the sharpest snipers in the space. In recent times, while Unibot captured the hearts and minds of degens for a time, another project named Banana Gun has clipped at its heels and closed the gap rapidly.

Distinguishing themselves more as an elite mass market sniper bot than a general trading platform that Unibot aspires to be, Banana has amassed astounding trading volumes with about zero marketing, when compared to the propaganda blitz that Unibots unleashed on CT. Because Ethereum miner tips have become the key to block building and sniping after the EIP 1559 ‘merge’, Banana has distinguished itself as the best bet for degens on account of the fact that its bribe bundles outrank those of all competitors.

And so when it came to $PENGY, nobody was surprised that its first two buyers were Banana users. What did intrigue observers was that while the first Banana sniper (‘baldisbasics.eth’) bribed an eye-watering 33 $ETH to be included as the first buyer of the token (54.5875 $ETH buy and 33.3 $ETH bribe), the second Banana buyer (‘ballsdrainer.eth’) sent a marginally smaller bribe (29.87 $ETH buy and 31.1 $ETH bribe). To put it differently, baldisbasics.eth bribed just about enough over and above ballsdrainer.eth, to make sure that he was first on the block.

The outcome? Baldisbasics.eth made over $100k in profits and ballsdrainer.eth lost over a $100k because it paid $4000 less in bribes to the Ethereum block builders.

Mistakes Were Made in a Wallet I Control

Anger brewed for a few hours after the $PENGY as allegations flew thick and fast in the Banana Bot TG channel – that the successful briber was in fact the Banana dev team, and they had leveraged their ability as project developers and owners to monitor ballsdrainer.eth’s bribe in order to frontrun and dump on him.

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The official Banana line was that baldisbasics.eth was not connected in any way to the Banana team and that all such allegations were FUD. ‘Cooker’ suggested that ‘TomJ’ frontran slikk.eth (ballsdrainer.eth), an allusion to which I shall return later.

Twitter handle @TimuridBabur had a short and insightful thread on the issue. His working conclusion was that Banana Team didn’t frontrun slikk.eth, because “Sniper 1 said no”, and he’s “really trustworthy”. TimuridBabur does underscore the fact that Banana Devs know who bids what, and the suspicious part of the entire saga wasn’t simply that baldisbasics.eth outbribed ballsdrainer.eth by a thin margin, but more so the fact that they frontran the latter’s sale bid which was executed via MEV/private transaction.

It may appeal to reason that Sniper 1 guessed Sniper 2’s bribe to outmaneuver him. But how did Sniper 1 successfully frontrun Sniper 2’s sell to make sure he was pure exit liquidity?

The absurdity of the depths of this bear market is that organizations like Arkham have taken to tweeting about the $PENGY launch fiasco. One post in their thread caught my attention – that both the sniper addresses had pooled funds from multiple different addresses to bid the $PENGY launch. Of course, the pooling wallet I am interested in is baldisbasics.eth, and it went something like this:

Note the interesting ENS addresses involved. On-chain enthusiasts will notice ‘howcanibehomophobicmybitchisgay.eth’ and ‘girlwantmeinheruterusfuckitimrichletsdoit.eth’ as prolific, successful and high-volume shitcoin traders. The ENS I like is ‘uniswaphero.eth’, which rings similar to ‘uniswapvillain.eth’, the wallet of TomJ, a CT personality that describes himself as the ‘owner of every wallet on Ethereum’ & likes to educate the public about shitcoin rugs and trading tools – such as Banana.

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Team is Anon, Take Caution with Your Funds

              TomJ is a formidable on-chain sleuth and a well known sniper in the shitcoin space. If he doesn’t know who the Banana team is, chances are, it’s a tough investigation. I did a bit of my own transaction mapping and stumbled across the wallets that funded, registered the Bananagun ENS addresses, and deployed Banana bot. And it makes for some interesting viewing, as you can see:

Curiously, uniswapvillain.eth appears to have funded devilmaycry999.eth with 2 $ETH on May 6, 2023, and devilmaycry999.eth went on to send 30 $ETH on May 8, 2023, to the wallet that eventually funded the creation of Banana Bot. The rest of the ENS addresses are visible in the graphic above. Note how some of them were also involved in the $PENGY launch and snipe.

Does this imply that some of these ENS addresses are involved in creating the Banana Bot project? And if so, were they also involved in funding baldisbasics.eth, which was ‘Sniper 1’ at the $PENGY launch? Is there some truth to the allegation that the Banana Bot project owners used their proprietary access to user activity in order to frontrun not just Sniper 2’s $PENGY buy, but also its sell transaction routed through an MEV bot?

Troubling questions with no single easy answer, I am sure.

Before Closing, a Thought on Banana Volume

In the Breadcrumbs map above, I have tagged one wallet as being the ‘Merging Wallet’, something that has seen a lot of $ETH flowing in and out from the ENS addresses reflected there. To be more specific, 104 $ETH in, and 781 $ETH out. Coincidentally, the Merging Wallet is the 4^th highest volume trader of Banana Bot, according to this tweet from @dvvm_btc, supposedly a buy volume of $853,846 and a sell volume of $1,144,243. Notably, the ENS girlwantmeinheruterusfuckitimrichletsdoit.eth (which funded Sniper 1 and is also reflected in the wallets connected to the creation of Banana Bot) is the 9th highest volume trader of Banana, with a buy volume of $545,795 and sell volume of $727,052.

In Conclusion

This piece on Banana feels like the tip of the iceberg. Three compelling points are made out.

• ENS addresses such as uniswapvillain.eth, girlwantmeinheruterusfuckitimrichletsdoit.eth, aydansmith.eth and others are probably the funders of and involved in the creation of Bananagun Bot.

• The same wallets were also the funders of baldisbasics.eth, which was Sniper 1 in the $PENGY launch, giving credence to the theory that the developers of Banana might just be using their user data to frontrun and profit off of them.

• Put together, these wallets are also trading, in the aggregate, millions of dollars through Banana Gun bot.

This is impressive, because it makes one wonder what the story behind Banana really is.