What's Driving Token Prices? September 13, 2023

BANANA (-99%) - Banana Gun, a telegram trading and sniping bot similar to Unibot, released its token on Monday. The token has been gaining traction in anticipation of an airdrop for tokenholders. Unfortunately, a bug in their trading tax contract could not be fixed and thus the Banana Gun team decided to sell its treasury wallet and drain the LP pool. This action sent $BANANA from ~$7 to $0.02 in a matter of minutes. Since then, the Banana Gun team said that they took a snapshot in order to relaunch $BANANA and make traders whole after an audit. In the day after the failed token launch, Banana Gun's market share fell from 65% to 50% in terms of trading bot volumes. We expect their dominance to continue declining until the team figures out how to properly launch a token and make impacted users whole again.
SYN (-16%) - Bridging project, Synapse, released a testnet on Monday for its Synapse Interchain Network and Synapse Chain. Synapse Chain, which is built as a roll-up using OP Stack, will provide security for Interchain Network users. The Interchain Network was the original Synapse product built to serve as the bridge between other chains so with the Synapse chain, in theory, the product should be more secure. The bridge currently holds $106m TVL, the second largest amount of any cross chain protocol, after Stargate.
XRP (-3.6%) - Last week, crypto payments project, Ripple, announced its acquisition of Fortress Trust, a chartered trust company and a digital asset custodian. Fortress Trust was in the news just a week ago for a data breach involving one of its third-party vendors. Impacted users by the breach were made whole by Ripple as part of the acquisition. Ripple plans to keep Fortress Trust’s current products while also accessing Fortress Trust’s Nevada trust license. The deal was rumored to be less than $250M in a mix of cash and equity.
TON (+2%) - Telegram, the most widely used messaging app among crypto enthusiasts, announced today that the TON network would be the official blockchain network for the Telegram messaging app. TON was created back in 2018 and raised $1.7B on the back of Telegram’s success as a messaging app. However, TON returned funds to users after a battle with the SEC. Despite this hiccup, the project still exists today and is now turning its focus to supporting Telegram and its Web3 wallet, which is available as a standalone bot in Telegram. The bot will be integrated into Telegram’s app and a non-custodial wallet called TON Space will be rolled out for non-U.S. users in the next 3 months.

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