The cryptocurrency market has witnessed a surge in the adoption of automated trading solutions, with trading bots gaining prominence for their ability to analyze vast data sets and execute trades with precision.
Cointelegraph has dissected historical bot revenues and token price rollercoasters and backtested strategy returns against the buy-and-hold yardstick to decode what bots shine brightest — and when — so you can pick the perfect bot to match your style and stomach for risk.
We have examined three types of trading bots: Telegram bots trading on decentralized exchanges (DEX), non-Telegram bots trading on DEXs and on centralized exchanges (CEXs), and the recently evolving AI agent bots.
Choosing the right trading bot depends on the user’s goals, risk tolerance and experience. At a glance:
-
Telegram bots are ideal for fast, opportunistic trading like token launches and memecoins.
-
AI agent bots, such as ai16z or Virtuals, suit users who want hands-off automation and are comfortable with experimental strategies.
-
CEX bots offer the most control and are best for structured strategies like dollar-cost averaging (DCA), grid or signal-based trading.
Bot trading strategies and performance
Trading bots are sophisticated automated systems that use algorithms to analyze cryptocurrency market data and autonomously execute trades on centralized exchanges or decentralized platforms. These bots typically operate continuously, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, requiring minimal human oversight. Their core function involves the analysis of extensive amounts of real-time and historical market data, including price fluctuations, trading volumes and order book information.
There are numerous potential advantages to employing AI agent trading bots. Their continuous operation ensures that no trading opportunities are missed, as they can monitor markets around the clock, accommodating global market movements. Some platforms offering these bots also provide backtesting capabilities, enabling users to evaluate the potential effectiveness of different trading strategies using historical data before deploying them with real capital.
Telegram DEX bots
Telegram bots operate via Telegram, leveraging its accessibility and real-time communication to execute trades directly on DEXs. They often focus on speed and sniping new tokens, appealing to users in fast-moving ecosystems like Solana. The recently launched protocols also included additional features that are often available in CEX trading bots, such as grid trading, DCA and limit orders.
Telegram bots such as Maestro and Unibot first appeared around 2020–2021. In 2022, many of these bots were already offering advanced features like copy trading and arbitrage.
By the end of 2023, Solana-based bots like BONKBot and Trojan Bot gained prominence for their speed in trading memecoins on DEXs. The biggest advantage of Telegram bots is their ability to trade on mobile devices without the need for a web browser extension to connect to a wallet. It hugely improves the usability of mobile trading, monitoring and integration with social networks.
The top five Telegram bots by historical trading volume across all blockchains are Trojan, BonkBot, Maestro, Banana Gun and Sol Trading Bot. The majority of the trading volumes in the past 90 days happened on Solana, where all of the top five Telegram bots operate.
The functionalities offered by the Telegram bots are very similar, with the exception that some of them (i.e., Maestro and Banana Gun) focus on multichain operations, whereas the rest focus on Solana.
The main use case for Telegram bots is to automatically identify profitable entry and exit points and execute trades quickly; it’s very difficult to track the profits or losses made by individual users from each trade. Since some of the Telegram bots, such as Banana Gun and BonkBot, offer a revenue-sharing model tied to their own tokens in the form of purchasing back their tokens with the 1% fee they charge, the token price and revenue (fees received) are used as an approximation of the performance of Telegram bots.
Looking at the total revenue in the past six months, Trojan has received the most nominal amount in fees (around $109 million), whereas Sol Trading Bot has the highest median daily revenue when normalizing the daily revenue in terms of the total revenue.
They all saw a peak around January 2025 during the memecoin season but are now facing a low-revenue period due to the broader bearish market conditions.
The two Telegram bots that share revenue through their tokens are Banana Gun and BonkBot. Looking at the price evolution in the past six months, the performance of the remaining parts is very similar, except for the significant rise in BONK’s price in November…
cointelegraph.com