XAI is on track to earn $1M without even trying thanks to Grok and Bankrbot

It looks like xAI is going to earn $1M (and potentially much more) income without even trying. This ball started rolling when an X user (believed to be @coin_domin), prompted xAI’s LLM Grok to respond with a reply that included the username “@bankrbot.”

What is Bankrbot?
Bankrbot is a auto-replying bot or serice that does some magic behind the scenes, which I’ll detail shortly. By inadvertendly replying and tagging @bankrbot, it in turn responded by creating a new contract the blockchain, and $DRB was born.

The contract is tied to a crypto wallet, which is automatically allocated permission to the account that created the associated coin. This means its tied to the X account @Grok, which is owned and operated by xAI.

At any time, employees with access to this account could prompt Bankrbot, or sign into the Bankrbot Terminal, to transfer the value from this wallet, to a wallet of their choice.

This means xAI owns and controls the money in that wallet. As yet, they’ve done nothing with it, but it’s steadliy climbing to a significant amount they could deploy.

The token name is Debt Relief Bot ($DRB) which is actively being traded with a current marketcap of $16.2M. At this point it’s really important to highlight the coin has no real-world value, it’s like any other memecoin, people buy and sell in the hope of making money. Standard disclaimers about not financial advice, do your own research and I’d actively encourage you not to invest.

Regarless of their motivations, people are trading the coin which is fair to describe as a memecoin. As transactions occur, fees are being generated from these trades are paid automatically to the creator, which as we know, in this instance is Grok, as the account that created the coin and has sole access to the wallet.

This all started back on March 7, and as you may expect when money is involved, people got creative. One user a user prompted grok to transfer around 4 ETH worth of trading fees, at the time worth around USD$14,131.96.

Grok replied and transferred all BNKR, DRB and WETH tokens to the user’s wallet. Thankfully the Bankr team responded quickly and the same day this was disabled.

“To safeguard Grok’s future clanker fees, Bankr will no longer be responding to Grok.” In turn, this cut-off cemented the status of $DRB as the main unofficial Grok token”

When user prompt Bankrbot, they initiate a workflow. That workflow takes the request in the X post (via the API) which calls to Bankr’s infrastrucutre, which in turns calls a 3rd party’s API from Privy.

BankrBot uses Privy as the wallet provider to spawn the digital wallets. Given money is involved and security concerns will rightly be present in people’s minds, we should understand that Privy was acquired by Stripe, the same company that provides payments for the X platform.

Bankrbot offers a Dashboard (which uses a very rudimentary UI), allowing you to chat and transact with these wallets without posting publicly on X. If a user, such as xAI makes a transfer from this wallet out of the system, it’s all available publicly on the blockchain, so while there may not be a post on X about it, we will know.

At the time of writing (August 8th), the value of Grok’s wallet is $702,084 which can be reviewed at: https://debank.com/profile/0xb1058c959987e3513600eb5b4fd82aeee2a0e4f9

Building the $techAU coin

There’s a lot to this technically which got me interested, so to understand this better, I listened to multiple conversations on XSpaces this week, but to really know it, I followed the same steps to create our very own $techAU contract and token (memecoin).

Step 1
I started simply tagging the BankrBot account in a post on X, asking it what my wallet address was. This initiatites the bot to setup a wallet on the Base blockchain – https://basescan.org/address/0xAF23635eDE10fdfd54C3bB4fb195812CF54A4B07

Step 2
I then asked it to create the $techAU token by prompted it on X, which it did, replying to my post with a contract address and a link to Clanker.world.

What’s Clanker?
Bankrbot deploys smart contracts for token creation using Clanker, a backend protocol and AI-driven bot specifically designed for streamlining ERC-20 token deployments on the Base blockchain. Clanker operates as an autonomous agent that handles the automated process, including contract creation, liquidity pool setup (often on Uniswap), and security features like integration with GoPlus’s SafeToken Protocol to reduce risks such as honeypots or rug pulls.

While I’ve been covering cryptocurrency for more than a decade, I never got into the details of how to create a contract and launch a coin. It is remarkable how easy it is to do this now in 2025, it used to require a whole team of engineers and developers and now it’s virtually fully automated and for now at least is being offered for $0.

The setup of smart contract for the coin and associated wallets tied to your X account is the easy piece, getting people to care about your memecoin in a sea of others is the challenging piece.

Is this something you can do to make money? Not really, not unless you can get many people to trade the crypto coin that again, to be clear, serves zero real world value.

XAI isn’t actively participating in this, but as the DRB coin gets traded, they will continue to make income whether they like it or not. At some point that gets interesting for them and it’ll be substantial and I’d like to see them do something interesting with the funds.

They could actually build a Grok-powered trading bot and use this income to fund it. They could chose to give it away each month to X Subscribers. They could give it to charities. Or they could even consider the original intent, and purpose of the name, to help with the growing debt crisis of the United States of America, although that number likely needs a T at the front, instead of an M or even a B.

Below is the Bankr Terminal UI which definitely is rudimentary. It allows you to get a history of all the prompts between your X account and the BankrBot. You can also prompt it up to 10 chats per day for free before requiring a paid account. There’s also an option to connect your own wallets to deposit money.

Such is the excitement around this big roud number of $1M being reached in Grok’s wallet, that betting service Polymarket even has it listed as something you can place bets on. Currently there’s a 68% chance that Grok’s memecoin wallet hits $1M before the end of August (aka September).