Web3 Games Infested by 200,000 Bots: Report

Jigger Research Finds Bots Rife on Binance and Polygon

Web3 games are teeming with bots, and many games residing on Binance are seriously compromised, according to research released on Aug. 30 by Jigger, a bot detection tool.

An analysis of more than 60 crypto-native games and services found that four out of 10 users were bots. There were a total of  200,000 bots in play in total, said Levan Kvirkvelia, the co-founder of Jigger.

Heavily Penetrated

The analysis predominantly looked at projects hosted on Binance Chain, the third-largest smart contract network by total value locked of $5.42B, and found that bots have heavily penetrated its ecosystem.Jigger said 70% of players on Tiny World, a top three-ranked game launched on Binance Chain with 35,000 monthly average users, were actually bots. Jigger also determined that 55% of accounts interacting with Mobox, a gamified yield farming and NFT platform with a monthly user base of 39,000, did not appear to be human.

The high rates of bot activity suggest that the rate of GameFi adoption could be lower than raw data suggests. It may also mean that a small number of sophisticated bot operators are scooping up the majority of the profits offered by many GameFi titles, potentially at the expense of users.

Many smaller games were found to be overrun by an even greater number of bots. AnRKeyX hosted extreme rates of bot activity, with 84% of the 9,763 wallets interacting with its token deemed to be bots. Nearly two-thirds of the 5,770 users interacting with the token of Decentral Games, a virtual gaming project backed by Binance Chain’s accelerator program, were found to be bots. 

Chain Hosting

Other protocols were also heavily populated by bots. The introduction of a referral program on the Biswap decentralized exchange was attributed to a third of its 36,301 tokenholders appearing to comprise bots. Half of the 13,305 tokenholders for Seedify Fund, a gamefi incubator and launchpad, also demonstrated bot-like behavior.

Binance is not the only chain hosting a high number of bots, with Polygon-based games also exhibiting significant bot activity, Jigger found.

Clusters of Wallets

A third of the 5,654 accounts interacting with Aavegotchi’s GHST Token on Polygon were flagged as bots, half of the 7,116 users interacting with Sunflower Land appeared not to be human players, and a whopping 96% of the 11,529 wallets interacting with Karmaverse Zombie Serum were labeled as bots.

The Jigger tool works by linking clusters of wallets believed to be operated by a single entity. Jigger analyzed wallets interacting with the native tokens of various web3 games over the past 60 days to determine the scale of botting activity present on each platform.

Representatives from Binance and Polygon did not respond to requests for comment.