Banana Gun Bot 🍌🔫 - Know Your Developers

Choose your Uniswap Villain

In my last post, I had detailed how a cluster of wallets including ‘devilmaycry999.eth’, ‘uniswapvillain.eth’, ‘angeloflight999.eth’ were intimately connected to the funding of the Bananagun Bot deployer wallet. I had missed out on another important funding wallet, namely ‘daneee.eth’. In any case, the wallets depicted in Map 1 below transferred more than 300 $ETH between each other on or around May 7, 2023 – this gives you perspective about the scale of capital being deployed. Angeloflight999.eth is probably the owner of devilmaycry999.eth given the similar naming conventions, and experienced traders in the shitcoin space would grasp immediately the significance of the fact that angeloflight999.eth was the original minter of the ENS ‘requisiem.eth’.

Map 1

This reality becomes interesting because uniswapvillain.eth and requisiem.eth are not just the creators of the Banana Gun project (or at the very least, know the creators), but over the last couple of years, famous (or infamous?) botters in the shitcoin space. What could induce individuals that drain liquidity from small traders to create a bot project and give control back to small traders? I have speculated in my previous post that the Banana owners could probably be using the Banana Gun bot to access user data in order to frontrun user trades.

Some would argue this makes sense – if I were a premiere botter group (a DAO?) and bear market volumes made for slim pickings, I might as well deploy the bot publicly so that my exit liquidity uses my own infrastructure – herding sheep to the slaughter.

To carve out a niche in the botting market led by Unibot and to prove the superiority of Banana Gun, certain wallets connected to the Banana Gun creators (baldisbasics.eth, et al) started trading millions of dollars worth $ETH through the Banana Gun routers. The illusion of volume was created, as was the ostensible superiority of the bot, with the narrative of how Banana ‘bribers’ always got in first. Of course, this meant that the team behind Banana had to invest hundreds of $ETH into bribes on Ethereum chain, which isn’t –EV because they would have done so in any case on their own custom bots, if not on Banana.

‘Not Suboptimal Code, just Suboptimal Humans’

By this stage, I felt the urgent need to explore just how the Banana Gun dev team ended up having extremely deep pockets. After all, they were throwing hundreds of $ETH into popularizing the Banana Gun brand through sheer trade volume, instead of organically marketing the way DTOOLS/Unibot did.

Now that we know who the owners of Banana Gun are (TomJ/UniswapVillain | Requisiem, or their friends), it becomes easier to visualize their fund mobilization on-chain. It goes without saying that Banana Gun bot code is not sub-optimal at all.

The question is whether that holds true also of the project owners.

TomJ, always with the irony.

I will be frank. At first, I didn’t find anything, but that’s often because there are so many wallets to sift through before patterns become evident and the unnamed but important wallets stand out from the rest.

But for a moment, let’s take a detour.

It is the general consensus amongst CT and Telegram shitcoin degens that we’re collectively suffering from various forms of mental illness – why else would we spend our best years trolling each other on chain, right?

My personal journey with tracking breadcrumbs across the blockchains was triggered in December 2021, with the Grimm Finance hack, a US $30m exploit on Fantom where the funds eventually found their way to CEX wallets after meandering through the Polygon, BSC and ETH chains. The exploit was simple. The manner in which the funds disappeared, not so much. No definitive conclusions have been arrived at till date, as to the perpetrator behind the fiasco.

In a stray Twitter conversation in February 2022, Canberk Bolat (@cnbrkbolat | ‘hacker/ software security’) had alleged that the wallets that Tornadoed Grimm Finance funds out were ‘wha1e.eth’ and ‘straighthack.eth’.

Source

To be honest, I had let the threads of the Grimm hack investigation slip through my fingers in Q1 2022 and I went on to completely forget the emotional impact it had made upon me.

Until, of course, I stumbled across ‘wha1e.eth’ and ‘straighthack.eth’ a few hops away on-chain from my now-familiar main character, uniswapvillain.eth.

Map 2

The present post is a short, exploratory one to share with you my initial observations. When it comes to the Banana Gun team, a lot more investigation is be required. For now, I shall take readers through 3 obviously PnD tokens deployed with funds through Tornado Cash but always linked back to straighthack.eth and wha1e.eth, which, as you can see from Map 2 above, is very well known to TomJ/UniswapVillain.eth.

Exhibit A: $JOEROGAN

On December 22, 2021, straighthack.eth sends 1 transaction of 10 $ETH and 2 transactions of 1 $ETH each. This 12 $ETH is immediately withdrawn to the wallet which deploys $JOEROGAN on the same day.

$JOEROGAN survived for about an hour. Liquidity was later pulled and sent to the Kucoin 13 wallet.

20 days after Joe Rogan Inu rugged, its deployer interacted with enter88.eth, which had earlier deployed $ENTERTHE88, and soon thereafter, removed liquidity in order to send it to the Kucoin 13 wallet.

As such, the $JOEROGAN deployer was linked to a number of PND scams. $SHIGER, $ENTERTHE88 and $MONSTER (Dr.Kenzo) tokens.

Dull stuff.

Map 3

Exhibit B: $REFLECTION

On December 31, 2021, straighthack.eth sends 10 $ETH and 1 $ETH to the Tornado Cash Router, which are immediately withdrawn to another wallet.

On January 1, 2022, the recipient wallet deploys $REFLECTION.

The token is immediately ‘called’ by TomJ/UniswapVillain’s TG channel, ‘Calls from the Crypt – Crypt Calls’ and a friend of his, ‘Senzu Calls’.

As such, $REFLECTION had a simple, quick death, displayed below. Liquidity was duly pulled a month later and dispatched to the Kucoin 13 wallet – case closed.

Exhibit C - $STACKT

Shitcoin veterans will recall $REFI, a FAAS (‘farming as a service’) project that did some good numbers. The Straighthack gang couldn’t let go of this opportunity and decided to fork $REFI to launch $STACKT.

Severelyngmi.eth and wha1e.eth funded the $STACKT deployer between January 9-11, 2022 and Tornadoed about 15 $ETH to the $STACKT deployer, which launched the token on January 10, 2022.

The token appeared to do well for a day or two, and it was called by a number of TG channels including Giba of Kingdom, until, of course, $STACKT rugged. I still recall the discussion by Kingdom immediately after. Quite amusing.

Done and Dusted

A Working Conclusion

At the outset, the simple facts. This isn’t a Unibot situation, where people interpreted my first piece of writing to suggest that at the worst, the Unibot devs abandoned their previous tech-driven projects. No.

UniswapVillain’s wallets are regularly connected to, and possibly behind, a number of PnD scams over the last 1.5 years. At the very least, he’s a part of a team of individuals who serially deploy PnD tokens and rug them.

The worst case scenario is that, the frequency with which this was done, with 10 $ETH deployments that are eventually withdrawn through the KuCoin 13 wallet, would suggest that this activity was part of a systematic scheme to wash funds through shitcoins (as theorized by @cnbrkbolat on Twitter/X).

Why would the owner of Banana Gun Bot want to do so?

For the moment, it is anybody’s guess.