The eagerly-awaited launch of the Telegram bot Banana Gun’s native token BANANA couldn’t have gone any worse, with the price of the newly launched BANANA falling from a peak of $8.70 to $0.02 in less than 3 hours after it launched.
Some crypto users were quick to cry foul, accusing it of a “rug pull.” However, the official X account for Banana Gun instead blamed a bug in the token’s contract that the team was unable to hotfix, noting that the bug managed to get through “despite two audits.”
Announcement
We have a bug in our contract we cannot hotfix.Despite two audits there is a bug in the contract with our taxes, which allows people to sell their bags while having tax tokens remaining in their wallet.
1. First step is to sell the treasury wallet to drain the LP…
— Banana Gun (@BananaGunBot) September 11, 2023
But the Banana Gun team and its so-called auditors are likely going to be red with embarrassment, after a pseudonymous coder, MisterChoc, claimed to use OpenAI’s chatbot ChatGPT to spot the flaw within seconds.
Banana claimed they had 2 audits. So I asked for a third one to my favorite auditor: ChatGPT
And it found the bug https://t.co/cA9ju08dHB pic.twitter.com/F1GCtmEiSs
— MisterCh0c (@Mister_Ch0c) September 11, 2023
The Banana Gun team outlined the “way forward” for users caught up in the crossfire, stating that the first step is to sell the treasury wallet to drain the liquidity pool to be used for a new contract.
Additionally, the team claimed that it would soon relaunch the token with an airdrop to ensure that unlucky BANANA investors could be made whole while having the new contract audited.
Related: Telegram trading bots are hot, but don’t trust them for custody — Security firms
In this case, ChatGPT has been praised for its ability to quickly spot the flaw; however, experts have continued to warn against using AI to write and audit code.
Speaking to Cointelegraph on Sept. 5, CertiK Chief Security Officer Kang Li said that ChatGPT and other AI-powered assistants may create more bugs than they identify, which could be catastrophic for amateur coders looking to build their own projects.
Banana Gun is one of the newest and more dominant entrants to the Telegram bot trading scene, pioneered by the outsized success of Unibot. Since Unibot, Telegram bot-enabled trading has witnessed a significant uptick in popularity among degen traders looking to quickly snipe new tokens and hunt airdrops more efficiently.
According to data from Dune Analytics, DEX trading bots notched a record daily trading volume of $16.7 million on Aug. 29.
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Big Questions: What’s with all the crypto deaths?