Crypto Twitter (CT) is that chaotic mad-house where degenerate, redacted, autistic tomfoolery happens. But there’s a world outside CT too, and the pastures are arguably greener there. Automation, signal generation, flow trackers, sentiment checkers are a few key arsenals for crypto traders, and this platform bestows users with all of it.

Yuh-huh, I’m talking about Crypto Telegram (TG). The right channels on this platform will gear you with hands-on strategies, updates, early sneak-peeks, and tips and tricks that will give you an extra edge over others. Telegram offers devs the Bot API to create programs that use TG messages as the interface. Simple commands given by you via text will translate to orders for the bot to fulfill, making your life simpler.

So, let’s delve straight into the use-cases of Crypto TG and then we’ll put it head to head against CT to weigh the pros and cons.

Telegram Trading, Bridging, Sniping Bots

No matter how good your success rate is, timing the market right is not always possible. There will be instances where you’ll slip down the slippery slope and you gotta be alright with that. Telegram bots are no different, except for the fact that they iron out the creases better. They help you find profitable coins to trade on DEXes. All you have to do is - make the algo dance to your rhythm.

Examples of basic commands you can give to TG Bots

Investors rely on fundamentals to make their investment choices. However, that is not the case with traders. They are impulsive AF and get onto any train in sight. The secret to ‘making it’ is to get there before everyone else. Enter Telegram sniper bots.

Sniper bots detect newly launched LPs and execute trades exactly at the time pools are deployed. This means the purchase would be made at the foot of the price curve. You can configure your profit booking stages parallelly, and as and when the curve ascends, the bot will end up selling tokens at predetermined thresholds set by you.

While you might keep refreshing/reloading Etherscan, SolScan or other blockchain explorers to know the live status, sniper bots directly keep an eye out on pending/unconfirmed transactions by scanning mempools, giving you the first-mover advantage.

Goes without saying that your bot will not always emerge successful. Say investors who got their hands on the tokens during the private sale could end up dumping right on the heels of your purchase, exposing you to a fallback. Likewise, if other sniper bots manage to get in before you, then you could lose your edge. But again, bots try to make up for the losses in future snipes.

The likes of AlphaMan, Unibot, Banana Gun, Mastero, Shuriken, Trojan, Bonkbot, and Wagie Bot have been contesting over user appeal, but there’s a clear winner when it comes to success rate on Ethereum. As of last month, Banana Gun’s sniping win rate stood close to 90%, miles ahead of Mastero - its very next competitor.

However, Ethereum tokens are not the hot trend now. Tokens on Solana have been dominating, and TG bots have been facilitating fund flows towards that chain lately.

When zoomed out, it can be seen that Mastero has settled the max volume to date, but other bots like BonkBot, Sol Trading Bot, Trojan that cater to Solana solely have the upper hand on the short-term volume front. UX wise, Unitbot and Banana Gun stand on a pedestal. Bonkbot users, on the other hand, face issues on a much more frequent basis.

In most cases, the on-boarding process is quite simple. You just have to register, verify, and connect your wallet using the links on the official Telegram channel, right after which you can instruct the bot to start trading or bridging or sniping tokens.

Bots also have advanced features and functionalities where you can set up backup transactions, extract details about snipe liquidity, tamper with the slippage, position yourself comfortably for gas wars, become eligible for presales, etc.

Some bot projects also have their own tokens. Right from becoming eligible for rebates to being able to add multiple wallets - several bonus perks are given to holders. Projects also encourage burning and grant users redeemable credit points. Likewise, staking ‘em also fetches rewards and slashes down transaction fees. Native Token holders of projects like Banana Gun also receive a piece of the revenue pie proportional to the number of tokens they hold. To top it all, the price of BANANA too has been making northward strides lately.

Unibot continues to charge taxes on token swaps, and is highly dependent on the same for its revenue. BananaGun, on the other hand, ended up nullifying that in January this year.

Advanced and Pro versions of bots are usually gated. So, if you don’t wanna use elbow grease, you’ll have to pay a certain fee and sign up with them. That will open the doors to accessing tailor-made indicators, indulging in simultaneous trades, etc. etc.

Even though top bots currently cater to chains like BSC, Ethereum, Arbitrum, Solana and Base, Avalanche presents itself as an emerging opportunity for devs to tap-on. Like it or lump it, alongside architectural flourishments, it was the meme-coin hype phase that brought Solana to the mainstream limelight and attracted users into the trade-arena. With its latest initiatives, Avalanche is now trying to position itself in a similar position, opening the doors for new TG bot projects to be deployed.

The good, bad, and ugly

The seamless experience, powered by automation, tops the tailwind list for me. You can execute trades in less than a second without leaving TG. There are several customization options: You can place upper/lower caps depending on your risk appetite. If you wanna DCA a particular token, TG bots will do that for you too. If tokens are labeled as honeypots, bots tend to block your snipe. Likewise, if it detects something fishy, like a rug pull, it’ll try selling your assets at the highest possible price before they end up becoming worthless. While sniping, you get the early bird advantage, and so on and so forth.

Things can’t be taken for granted when it comes to tech, for the susceptibility w.r.t. vulnerabilities intensify. Bots are often closed-source, and the transparency factor is always a shaky ground. A few months back,for instance,  a newly deployed Unibot contract was compromised. Users ended up losing their tokens, courtesy: a new router approval exploit. Laundered funds were first moved to Uniswap, and then Tornado Cash and panic spread like wildfire. The team, however, stepped in within the snap of a finger and made users whole by compensating them.

On the heels of its launch, even Banana Gun suffered an exploit, despite going through a couple of audits. A smart contract bug allowed users to sell their assets, while tax tokens remained untouched in their wallets. Coders like ‘MisterChoc’ revealed that ChatGPT was able to find out the flaw in the code in no time, putting the project and its devs in an embarrassing joker-faced situation. Nevertheless, the team took things in stride and came up with a new contract, re-audited it and re-launched the project after sorting out things. Even in this case, holders, LPs and pre-salers were reimbursed via airdrops.

Sometimes, few things are beyond your control, and you ought to accept that. But what you can do is not be an unwary trader and let malicious actors gobble up your wallet balance. Since you’ll be connecting your wallet directly, it’s better to have a separate one dedicated for bot trading. Even though bots end up deleting your private keys after you use the unregister command, it is always a lil scary to leave the wallet unattended. So, it’s better to empty the tokens to another wallet to err on the side of caution. Other usual disclaimers: stay away from impersonator channels, join only using official links, don’t over-allocate, beware of bugs and other back-end technical risks, and don’t forget to enable 2FA.

Signals

There are several channels that keep churning out signals for traders to hop-on and copy trade. Doesn’t matter if you’re a DEX user, or a CEX user, you can look into their calls, pull out a chart on TradingView by yourself and see if you’re on the same page with their analysis or not, and execute your bid/ask accordingly. They specify the entry range, the optimal leverage that should be used, the take-profit targets, and stop loss levels. There’s Wall Street Queen Official, Raven Signals, and Bitcoin Industry that are fairly spot on with their calls. Some focus solely on crypto, while others, also integrate forex calls alongside. You don’t have to follow every trade on signal channels, but sometimes adding coins from their calls to your watchlist and scalping per your conviction does wonders.

Fundraising

Channels that give fundraising-related alerts are also quite handy on Telegram. As and when institutions pour funds and back a particular venture, your phone buzzes with a notification. Chalking out patterns and identifying cherry-picked niches where money is flowing into helps you filter out hot narratives, and in retrospect, you can look into other projects from the same boat that have a competitive edge.

If you’re just a token buyer-and-seller, you can directly start filtering out tokens belonging to trending industries. Of late, for instance, institutional capital has been flowing into projects from the gaming and L2 solution space, and price wise also, tokens from these genres have been performing well. Crypto Fundraising and CryptoRank Fundraising Digest are my go-to channels.

Alongside updates, there are bots on Telegram that also lend insight relegated to the macro fundraising trends. This makes it easier to delve into categories that you’re interested in by just clicking on the corresponding number.

Smart money wallet trackers & whale flows

Smart money inflows/outflows is another base that I keep tabs on. It serves as a proxy to how the market would react over the short-term. Lookonchain’s channel gives updates about such trends. Traders that have an edge over others are known to gamble with off-beat coins, and with the right entry and exit strategy, they end up making millions.

Nansen’s Smart Money Alert channel also gives insights into smart money token transactions, what vesting recipients are doing with their tokens, wallet shufflings, burns, etc. It also keeps track of MEV bot transactions involving huge sums of money. They parallelly link the transaction deets on the blockchain explorer for reference. Alongside, deets with regard to CEX transfers are also covered here. Other channels like WhaleBot Alerts, Whale Alert, and ClankApp - Crypto Whales Tracker also keep track of all sizable transactions, including treasury to CEX transfers.

Airdrops, Unlocks

Telegram is also quite a useful platform when it comes to tracking upcoming unlocks and airdrops. Even if the dates slip your mind, messages from channels like Token Unlocks, and Airdrops For All will help you keep the eye on the ball. Added advantage: there are discussion forums as well where community members hash out potential implications and dissect the viability of projects.

Volume Discrepancy Highlighters

Metric analysis is the bread and butter for crypto nerds like us. Channels like CryptoQuant and IntoTheBlock keep dropping regular updates quantifying on-going trends and what to make of them. Parallelly, their alert channels are also resourceful in providing updates about inflows/outflows to/from centralized exchanges.

DEXes did gain tremendous popularity during the industry-wide catastrophe last year. But on the spot volume front, it has been losing its say since the past few months. CEXes i.e. Binance in particular along with multiple others including Coinbase, OKX and Bybit, still handle the major chunk of spot volume. Thus, flow updates on TG, more often than not, act like precursors to the price action that’s set to follow and help in placing short term bets with much more conviction.

Indicator/metric related trend identifiers

If you’re a long term investor who cares about dev activity, then Santiment alerts on TG are a game-changer. They keep rolling out lists featuring the ones leading on this front and help you make calculative decisions. Likewise, even other sets of on-chain data revolving around network activity, accumulation trends and coin age give you an idea of how these projects are perceived by the masses - Are they underrated or overrated? Do they have room for growth? Have they reached a point of saturation?

Additionally, Glassnode and LunarCrush alerts on TG help you zero-down the right entry/exit levels based on social patterns.

Derivatives

Channels like Paradigm Edge, Laevitas and QCP Broadcast serve you with crisp updates revolving around the futures and options market. Just a glance over their messages every day will give you an idea of how traders are positioning themselves, based on what orders are piling {puts/calls}, what strategies are being implemented, the state of the basis curve, whether the market is in contango or backwardation, range accruals, OI trends etc. Such deets often help navigating expiry days with parallel trades.

Updates, News Aggregators

Metaverse | Nfts | News, Wu Blockchain News, and of course, the blocmates buffet are a couple of channels that give you updates about what’s happening in the crypto, DeFi and Web3 space - right from partnerships, to launches, and records-clinched - they’ve gotchu all covered.

When it comes to News Aggregators, people loveeee CryptoPanic. Based on what kind of news you want to read about, you just shoot the command on TG. Personally, I am not really a fan of Cryptoanic’s TG aggregator - it ain’t that comprehensive. I like it better on the website. That being said, I’d recommend to turn on notifications for individual news publications on TG - they drop story links on the channel as soon as it goes live and mostly end up covering everything from a-z.

Pre/post on-chain attack related warning groups

ZachXBT and PeckShield are a cut above everyone else when it comes to on-chain investigations regarding hacks. Messages on their investigation channels provide you with all the updates regarding exploits, what steps to follow if victimized and what additional precautionary measures to take to avoid similar occurrences in the future. Alongside, there’s Medium Rare’s all-in-one channel also where discussions related to every mishap and non-mishap take place. Brownie points: This group also touches upon several other topics associated with trading and airdrops under its roof.

Additionally, there are several ways using which you can integrate your other social apps like Twitter to Telegram to get all the updates in one place, streamlining everything.

Inference

Cutting it to the chase: You’d obviously end up dying of FOMO if you just stick to Telegram. The vibe on TG is a tad bit serious when compared to Twitter. CT is the pulse of the crypto community - people have their own hype squads, keep backing and pushing each other to strive better, and at the same time, manage to keep fun and banter a part of the equation.

The CT community is larger than the Crypto TG community, but what Telegram lacks in volume, it makes up for in depth. You are exposed to exclusive updates, insider tips. On Twitter, the only bots you get to encounter are the ones that spam your comment section, but on Telegram, the bots relieve you of the unnecessary burden by doing things for you. This platform is the epicenter for crypto trading signals and auto-purchases, and that’s undisputable. For the ones having time-constraint, Crypto TG is like that hen that lays golden eggs. You become consistent with trades and end up optimizing your success rate with time.

On the asset front, TG users bet on all things speculative, especially the newly launched ones. They are the first ones to invest in projects, making them both the path pavers and lab rats at the same time. CT users are fairly more inclined towards due diligence and take calls based on fundamentals and conviction. CT users stick to manual charting and analysis followed by DEX navigation and self-execution of trades. Users learn things the hard way there, and experienced players act like torchbearers, ensuring others don’t fall into the same traps where they were victimized.

The masses steer away from on-chain trading because of uncomfy and complicated UX, but TG sorts that out with the help of its tools by providing users, like your dad, an easier user-friendly way of interacting with smart contracts. That being said, blind, sugar-coated optimism will take you nowhere. Crypto TG and its tools are revolutionary, but take everything with a grain of salt and strategically place yourself in positions that don’t cost you your night’s sleep!