How to Read a Telegram Bot's Audit Report

What an audit report actually is

A Telegram bot audit report is a point-in-time review of specific code by a named third party. A team hands over a defined set of contracts or files, an outside reviewer reads them, and the result is a document listing what that reviewer found. It is written for the team that commissioned it, not for the person about to deposit funds.

What it is not

An audit report is not a licence. No regulator issues it, no authority approves it, and no one certifies the bot as safe. It is not a safety mark you can treat the way you treat a deposit guarantee, and it says nothing about the Telegram bot you are about to use: not its servers, not the person running it, not how withdrawals are handled.

The report describes code as it existed on one date. Code changes, deployments change, and the review does not follow the code afterwards. A report from last year sits next to a bot that has been rewritten twice since.

Why it is still worth reading

The document shows that someone outside the team looked at something and wrote down what they found. That is a real, checkable fact, and it is more than most bots offer. It also shows whether the team publishes the record at all, which tells you something about how the operator communicates.

Audit reports are usually written for developers, and most of the pages are technical. The parts that matter to a trader are in the first few pages:

• the reviewer's name
• the scope: what was reviewed and what was left out
• the code identifiers: commit hash, contract address or version
• the findings table with severity and status

What follows

Four things to check in the document itself: who wrote it, what the scope covers, whether the audited code matches the bot in use, and what the findings say about what happened next. After that, the parts of a Telegram bot that no code review can reach, and the signs a report is decoration rather than evidence.

Step one: who wrote it

Open the cover page or the header. There should be a named person or firm behind the review, with a way to reach them. A file that carries only the bot's own logo and brand, with no outside reviewer, is a marketing document describing the product to itself.

Check the auditor exists independently

Search the auditor's own website for the report title or the project name in their published work list. Most auditors list what they were paid to review, sometimes after an embargo ends. If the report appears on the bot's site but nowhere on the auditor's, treat it as unverified until you find it there.

Look at what that auditor normally reviews

Firms specialise. A team known for Solana program reviews, or for EVM smart contracts, is a different signal from a general web-security shop that mostly tests websites and APIs. Both can be useful, but they answer different questions about a trading bot.

Compare the dates

Note the date printed on the report and the date it appears in the auditor's list. They should line up, allowing for an embargo. A report dated years before the bot's current version tells you about old code, not the code running now.

Read the limitations

Commissioned reviews are normal: the bot team pays, the auditor reviews. Look for what the auditor says about liability and reliance, and whether they reviewed a fixed snapshot of code or an evolving system. A short engagement with a narrow scope is common and worth knowing about.

A logo is not a report

A security badge on a landing page means little on its own. The question is whether the named firm published that document itself.

One named auditor is not a guarantee of anything. The name tells you who read the code. It says nothing yet about what they found.

Step two: read the scope before anything else

The scope section lists which contracts, which chains and which parts of the system the reviewers looked at. Read it before the findings, because everything after it is limited by it. A finding cannot exist outside the scope, and neither can the assurance you take from the report.

What was reviewed, and on which chain

Check the chains named in the scope against the chains the bot actually supports. A review of one contract on one chain says nothing about the others. A Solana-only review does not describe an Ethereum router, and vice versa.

Then distinguish the audited units. Reports name specific pieces:

• a token contract
• a router or swap contract
• a staking or rewards contract
• a wallet or custody contract

A reviewed token contract is not a reviewed trading engine. If the report covers the token but not the contract your trades pass through, the document is about a different question than the one you are asking.

Exclusions and review type

Look for explicit exclusions. Good reports list what was left out: frontend, backend, key management, infrastructure, third-party dependencies. Those exclusions tell you where the report stops.

Note the type of review. It may be a manual code review, automated analysis, or both. Automated tools produce long lists of low-severity warnings and, on their own, shallow assurance.

Check whether the review covered deployment and configuration or only source code. Note the review period too: a short window on a large codebase is a limitation the report should state itself.

The scope tells you the size of the claim. A narrow scope is not a red flag. An unclear scope is.

Step three: match the audited code to the bot you are using

A report only describes code it can be tied to. Without an identifier, the document describes something, but not the software you are about to send funds into.

Three identifiers, in order of strength

Take the identifier from the report and check it against what the bot publishes now: the docs, the contract address the bot routes trades through, the version shown in the interface. A filename like Router.sol is not an identifier.

Old code and later upgrades

If the report names a commit and the project has shipped many releases since, the review describes older code. That is common. State it plainly rather than treating the report as a description of today's build.

Ask whether anything was upgraded after the review date. Upgradable contracts and re-deployed routers mean the audited code may no longer be what executes when you trade.

Then look for a re-audit or a follow-up review covering the newer version. A re-audit after a significant upgrade is normal practice, not an extra.

When there is no identifier

If no commit, address or version appears anywhere in the report, the document cannot be matched to any code, and it cannot support a claim about the code running today.

Keep the conclusion narrow. A matched identifier means the report describes that code at that point. It says nothing about the servers behind the bot or the Telegram process that handles your keys. You can read bot documentation next to a report on the /bots pages and check which chains each one supports on /chain/solana.

Step four: findings, severity and what happened next

Findings are usually ranked from critical down through high, medium, low and informational, though every firm uses its own scale. Read the definitions, not just the labels: one firm's "medium" can cover what another calls "high".

Read the critical and high findings in full

The interesting part is the description, the impact and the recommendation, not the count. "Three high findings" tells you nothing on its own. A high finding that describes a function letting any caller move funds, followed by the fix the team applied, tells you what was at risk and what changed.

Check the status of every finding

Each item should carry a status:

A report full of acknowledged critical findings is a different document from one where every critical item is resolved. Both get published. Only one describes code that was fixed. If a report has no status column at all, treat every finding as open.

Judge the shape of the document

Be sceptical of a report with no findings at all. Reviewers normally raise something, even if only informational notes. Look for a retest section or a follow-up date confirming the fixes, and look at the ratio of automated tool output to manual analysis. Pages of scanner warnings can pad a document without telling you much.

The limit is worth stating plainly: a report with all findings resolved is evidence that specific issues were fixed at a point in time. It is not evidence that the code is free of other problems.

Smart contract audit versus platform audit

The word "audit" covers at least three different documents, and they answer different questions.

A smart contract audit is the narrowest of the three. It looks at the contracts, their functions, who can call them, and whether the logic can be abused. It says nothing about the server that signs transactions.

A platform or infrastructure audit covers the machinery behind the bot: how systems are deployed, who holds administrative access, how permissions are separated, how data is stored. For a Telegram trading bot this is the part that matters most, because the bot process is where keys are handled and withdrawals are approved. A team that publishes only a contract audit has told you about a fraction of the system you are trusting.

The type is usually easy to identify. The title often says it, and the scope section always does: it either names contracts and chains or names servers, APIs and processes. If a bot advertises "an audit" without saying which kind, the claim cannot be evaluated.

None of the three substitutes for the others. A team can hold all three reports and still run the service badly; the documents describe what was reviewed, not how the bot behaves on a Tuesday.

What no audit report covers

An audit report describes code. A Telegram trading bot is code plus a running service, a team, an account and a set of terms. Everything below sits outside the scope of a code review, and it is where most of the risk to your deposit actually lives.

The service that holds your funds

The bot process receives your commands, signs transactions and sends them to the chain. An audit of the contracts does not examine how that service is deployed, patched, monitored or taken offline. Servers can be misconfigured, an admin panel can be left exposed, a hot wallet can sit on a machine with more access than it needs.

Key custody

Ask how private keys are stored, whether they are encrypted, who can reach them and whether anyone besides you can move funds. Key handling is often proprietary and off-chain, so it rarely appears in a published report. A clean contract audit says nothing about it.

Withdrawal handling

Who approves withdrawals, what limits exist, and what happens when the chain is congested or the bot is dealing with an incident. These are operational policies, not code paths, and they are usually described in the terms rather than in a report.

The operator behind the handle

The people behind the bot, the company, the jurisdiction and who is accountable if something goes wrong. An auditor reviews a repository; it does not vet the business.

The Telegram account itself

Impersonator bots copy names, logos and handles. No audit protects you from messaging the wrong one. Use only the handle published on the bot's own website, and check it every time before you send funds.

Hosting, frontend and dependencies

The website, DNS, hosting and third-party services the bot relies on for prices, RPC access or execution can fail or be compromised without any bearing on the audited contracts.

The economics and the terms

Fees, spread, referral schemes and the conditions you accept on deposit. Read the fee documentation and the terms as carefully as the report.

The honest conclusion: a report is evidence of review, not evidence of safety. The parts it leaves out are the parts that decide whether your funds come back.

Signs a report is decoration rather than evidence

A genuine report can be traced in two directions: back to the person who wrote it, and forward to the code it describes. When both trails stop at the bot's own marketing pages, what you are holding is a promotional asset, not a review.

What is missing

• No auditor name, or a name that appears only on the bot's own site and nowhere else, with no firm, no profile and no published work.
• No scope section, or a scope written in generalities: "the platform", "our smart contracts", "the backend". A scope worth reading names files, contracts and chains.
• No code identifier. Without a commit hash, a contract address or a version number, nothing ties the document to the code that actually runs.
• No findings table, or a table with severity labels and no description of what was found, where, and whether it was fixed or accepted.
• Screenshots instead of the report. A PDF that cannot be downloaded, opened or searched is a picture of a document, not a document.
• A badge on the landing page. A security firm's logo with no link to anything that firm published about this project.
• A stale date. A report from years ago presented as current, with no re-audit after the last upgrade.

How to weigh it

One missing piece is a question to put to the team before you deposit: where is the full report, and who wrote it. Several together change the picture. At that point the audit claim should not influence your decision to deposit at all, and the choice between bots should rest on what you can verify yourself.

A checklist to run on any report

Six checks in a few minutes

1. Auditor named, and listed independently. The report should name the firm, and the same report should appear on that firm's own site. If it exists only as a PDF on the bot's page, stop there.
2. Scope read and understood. Write down what was reviewed: which contracts, which chains, which parts of the system. Anything outside that list was not reviewed, whatever the badge says.
3. Code identifier present and matched. A commit hash, a contract address or a version number ties the report to a specific build. Without one, you cannot tell what was audited.
4. Date checked, and re-audits looked for. An audit covers code as it stood on one day. If the bot has shipped upgrades since, look for a follow-up review covering them.
5. Findings read, severity by severity. Go through the critical and high items first and note whether each is marked resolved or acknowledged. "Acknowledged" means the team saw the issue and chose to keep the code as it is.
6. A platform or infrastructure review checked for. A contract audit and a review of the servers, key custody and withdrawal handling are different documents. Look for both.

What this gives you

The checklist produces a description, not a verdict. It tells you how much the report actually claims, over what period, against which code, and with which issues still open. That is the honest limit of any audit document.

The other half of the check

Reports describe code. Documentation describes how the operator says the bot works: fees, custody, withdrawal rules. Banana Gun, Trojan, BONKbot, Maestro, Sigma and Unibot each publish documentation you can read next to any report. Start from /bots for the full list, or /chain/solana for Solana bots, and use /bot/banana-gun as one worked example of how a page reads next to a report.

Put two bots side by side on BotFees and compare what each one publishes about its code, its contracts and its terms before you send anything. To see that in practice, compare Banana Gun and Trojan and how two Solana bots present their documentation and terms.

Frequently asked questions

Does an audit report mean a Telegram trading bot is safe?

An audit report is evidence that someone reviewed specific code, not a safety certificate. It does not cover the Telegram handle you message, wallet custody, key storage, server security, admin powers, fee changes or the tokens you trade. A report can be clean and funds can still be lost through a compromised deployer key, a malicious upgrade or an impersonator bot. Read the scope, date, commit hash and open findings before you trust it. A report lowers one kind of risk. It does not remove the risk of sending funds to a bot that holds your private key.

What is the difference between a smart contract audit and a platform audit?

A smart contract audit reviews on-chain code: functions that move funds, access control, upgradeability, external calls, arithmetic and token handling. A platform audit reviews the off-chain system around it: bot backend, wallet and key management, APIs, database, signing, deployment, authentication and logging. A Telegram bot can have both, and the report should name what was reviewed. If a report says "platform audit" but only lists contract files, the scope is narrower than the label. Check the exclusions as carefully as the findings.

What do the severity labels in an audit report mean?

Most reports use Critical, High, Medium, Low and Informational. Critical usually means funds can be lost or stolen, or the system can become insolvent. High means a serious flaw with a realistic route to loss or broken controls. Medium means limited impact or conditions that are harder to meet. Low covers minor issues and best practice. Informational is usually no direct security impact. Names and thresholds differ by auditor, so read the definitions in the report. An open Critical or High finding needs a clear explanation before you rely on the report.

What does resolved versus acknowledged mean in a findings table?

Resolved means the team changed the code and the auditor confirmed the fix, usually in a later commit or retest. Acknowledged means the team knows about the issue and accepts the risk without fixing it. That can be a deliberate design choice, a pending change or a disagreement about impact. An acknowledged Critical or High finding is a warning: ask why it was accepted and what compensating control exists. Do not read "resolved" as "no residual risk". Check whether the retest covered the same code that is now deployed.

Why does the commit hash or contract address matter?

An audit covers one exact version of the code. A commit hash or contract address ties the report to that version. If the deployed contract or bot backend differs, the report does not describe what is running now. For upgradeable contracts, the implementation and admin can change after the audit. For a Telegram bot, the commit hash may cover only part of the system, while the live server and key handling sit outside it. Without a hash or address, you cannot tell whether the report applies to the code you are using.

The bot says it is audited but I cannot find the report. What should I check?

Check the bot's own website and docs first, not its Telegram bio or forwarded messages. Look for the auditor's name, a report link, the date, scope, commit hash or contract address and the findings table. Search the auditor's own site for the report. Confirm the Telegram handle from the bot's official website, because impersonator bots are common. If the report is not linked from official docs and not published by the auditor, the claim is unverified. Never share a seed phrase with anyone, including support.