HEGE BuyBot, Reporting for Duty

It Was Time for an Upgrade

Back in October last year, we released the first version of HEGE BuyBot, our own Telegram buy bot.

At the time, the community had grown tired of the third-party bots that never seemed to work quite right, and wouldn’t let us design our own buy messages the way we wanted. So enough was enough, and Day dusted off his Python-fu and designed a fully custom bot, built from the ground up exactly for our needs. Thus, HEGE BuyBot was born.

That first version used Solscan for fetching buy data. It worked alright, but API access was wildly expensive. So in the spirit of spring cleaning and bear-market cost-cutting, it was time for an upgrade.

What is A Telegram Buy Bot Anyway?

But let’s take a step back here first. What’s this even about? What is a buy bot and why should you want one?

A buy bot is something that every memecoin community has in their Telegram chat. It’s an automated bot that sends a message to the chat whenever somebody buys their token ($HEGE on Solana in our case). It’s a nice way to create some buzz in the chat, and it’s generally liked by the community.

There are a couple of ready-made buy bots that most communities use. They work alright, and they’re customizable to some extent.

Why Did We Build Our Own Buy Bot?

The main problem we had with the existing third-party bots was that we simply could not customize them enough to our liking.

We wanted several things that they would not give us:

• High-quality MP4 animations instead of just static images or GIFs.
• Custom emojis and messages.
• Different animations and messages based on the dollar value of the buys.

These features were just not available anywhere. So it was either we settle for mediocre, or we build our own bot. Obviously, we weren’t going to settle for mediocre, so rolling up our sleeves and getting to work was the only option.

The Solution: HEGE BuyBot

HEGE BuyBot is a lean Python-based bot built from scratch.

The setup is simple: a bare-bones Python WSGI app served by Gunicorn is listening for SWAP webhook events from Helius. Whenever one comes in, the incoming data is parsed, a suitable message is selected, and the message is then sent to our Telegram.

Initially we used Solscan as a source for buy data, but we have now switched to Helius Webhooks. Helius has a generous free tier, and their webhook service was easy to hook up to our bot.

The beauty of the design is that the message selection is fully programmable. We can now use whatever emojis we want, set up completely custom messages for different dollar value ranges, and even add special “easter eggs” messages for specific buy values (like the one below).

This might not seem like a big deal. But seeing these custom messages instead of the generic ones used everywhere else, it does make the chat feel special.

Where Do We Take It Next?

More custom messages!

Aside from that, we’ve actually already used the new features to create a buybot treasure hunt competition, where we hid 10 easter eggs in the buy bot. The competition is still running: so far 9 of the easter eggs have been found, so there’s still one more to discover! Read all the details in the announcement blog post.

We’re also considering opening up the bot for other communities to use, but nothing has been decided yet (let us know if you’re interested!)

Thanks For Reading!

Until next time, have a great weekend, and make sure to jump into our Telegram and say hi to all the Hegends in there. Good vibes guaranteed!

— Team Hege

PS. Check out the piece “ZOMBIE ATTACK!” below. This collectible is up for sale on our DRiP!