THESIS:  BANANA has the 6th highest 7d revenue in crypto. Holders generate 60% + APY without having to stake. We think this trajectory we think will continue with chain expansion, retail adoption, and persistent speculative activity surrounding memecoins.

Summary: What is BananaGun

BananaGun is a telegram trading bot that allows users to snipe tokens at launch with built in anti-rug and reorg protection, in addition to providing standard swap and limit order functionality. Users place these trades directly through TG chat interfaces. BananaGun initially launched as a purely Ethereum focused TG bot, but has since expanded to Solana, Base, and soon Blast, and is on the verge of releasing a webapp. In terms of actual PMF, cash flows and fundamentals, BananaGun is likely one of the strongest liquid opportunities in crypto. That it is also hyper-focused on the crypto zeitgeist and provides a picks-and-shovels play to the memecoin narrative is just syrup, cherries, and sprinkles on top.

Traction and Dominance

Even before the implosion of Unibot, BananaBot had effectively captured the Ethereum bot market, winning ~90% of first bundles – the most important metric of a sniping bot. That’s great, but this cycle most memecoin activity isn’t on Ethereum, it’s on Solana and Base. BananaGun is also on Solana, which is definitely a far more competitive environment: Trojan (Unibot split), BonkBot, Maestro, Sigma are all there. The team has committed to dedicating more efforts to winning the Solana market, and given how dominant they were on Ethereum, they are well-poised to outcompete many of the same teams they are up against on Solana. Newly launched on Base, BananaGun is seeing 30-50%+ of its volumes on Base, with the remainder split evenly across Ethereum and Solana. Competitors of note on Base include Maestro, Sigma, and what’s left of Unibot. Essentially, aside from Solana (where they are competitive and doubling down efforts), BananaGun is the clear market leader on every chain on which they have deployed, and 2nd overall in terms of aggregate volumes behind only BonkBot. It is also the first on Blast, which is about to see a cascade of new token launches over the coming months.

BananaGun has done over $3B in lifetime trade volume, averaging about $50M per day currently. Across all metrics, it is hitting fresh all-time highs, and the users that it is attracting are high-value and sticky. To date, BananaGun has generated almost 8.5K ETH and 32K SOL in total fees.

To put this in perspective, if you exclude chains and rollups, over the past 30 days BananaGun has generated the 5th highest revenues out of any project – just $1.2M behind Lido and $3M ahead of Aave. It has generated 3x the revenue of Uniswap Labs. Over the past week? BananaGun is #1, full stop.

What truly sets BananaGun apart is that it shares a major chunk of this revenue (40%) with token holders, generating almost 60% APY (7D MA) in passive income, and increasing, trading at just 1.1 EPS.

There is a fixed 10,000,000 supply cap, of which 1,079,500 have already been burned (various in-app features require burning BANANA for credits). An additional 60.5% treasury allocation is locked, vesting over 24 months, used for trading rewards (anything unused is relocked). The team has two allocations: 5% of initial supply that receives revenue share, locked for 8 years, and another 5% excluded from revenue share but only locked for 2 years with a 3 year vest. Currently, just 2,856,041 BANANA across 2,962 addresses are eligible for earnings rewards. TGE was in September 2023.

Catalysts

Base and Blast seasons are coming and BananaGun has already established itself as the leading bot on each. It is integrated with Uniswap, Sushiswap, PancakeSwap, Baseswap and Aerodrome on Base, and Thruster, Hyperblast, DYORswap, Monoswap, Bitconnect and Blasterswap on Blast.

In terms of exchange listing, the closest to a tier 1 listing live is HTX. While it is unclear if there are any immediate changes here, listing on any of the majors would go a long way towards opening up BANANA to retail access.

Likely the biggest catalyst is the upcoming Webapp. The TG trading interface is admittedly a steep learning curve and clunky to use, even for crypto native users. Providing a webapp that provides all of this functionality through a more familiar UX, paired with its integration with the 4 chains likely to see most retail activity in the coming months, has the real potential of positioning BananaGun as most traders’ first stop for making any trades, not just sniping.

And potentially the best? BANANA itself is absolutely Memeable.

Valuation

BANANA is currently trading at just 1.1 EPS (44.27 EPS) and spitting off 60%+ APY in direct cash flows to token holders, it appears substantially undervalued by any metric. Delphi put together a great cash flow-based valuation in February, assigning a bull case target value of $65.40 and best-possible case value of $163.49. Note that this was assuming a 75% annual growth rate for 12 months, when daily revenues were ~$150K. Over the past month, daily revenues have regularly exceeded $400K and have broken $500K on several occasions, averaging $450K over the past week. If BananaGun’s growth plummets to 0 and simply stays at this level going forward, they will have already exceeded that most optimistic case by 2-3x.   

With conservative assumptions one can trace a path to base case of $92.00 -$132.00 per token quite easily. Taking $167 ARPU and dividing by 8 months the app has been life suggests roughly $20.82 per user per month. Over March 2024 there was roughly 7000 MAU. If we assume this can grow by 10% per month, getting us to just shy of 20,000 MAU by March 2025, and assigning a straight 40% of fees shared with token holders, one can expect roughly $12M per month in fees and almost $5M in rev share to token holders. Annualizing those final 3 months suggests $140M run rate and $54M rev share to holders. A conservative multiple of 10x on that share is $550M in market value, on an estimated 4.1M circulating BANANA, suggesting $130 per BANANA.

Indirect Memecoin Exposure

An added benefit is that BANANA provides indirect exposure to memecoin speculation. I saw the below tweet recently, and while largely true, we think BANANA is an exception, given its strong underlying fundamentals and growth trajectory.

https://x.com/reganbozman/status/1772421883511611620