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History
Note
This page was written with help from ChatGPT to organise and present Ghost's history in a clear, readable format.
While AI assisted with the writing, structure and editing, the timeline, events and behind-the-scenes information were provided and verified by Benny, Ghost's founder and current maintainer. Public milestones, such as release dates, have also been cross-referenced with GitHub where applicable.
Ghost's story actually begins before Ghost itself existed.
Back in 2020, Benny was introduced to Discord selfbots by a friend. Curious about how they worked, he purchased Nighty, one of the most popular selfbots at the time. It didn't take long before curiosity turned into wanting to build one himself. After experimenting with discord.py, he realised that creating a selfbot wasn't nearly as complicated as it first appeared, so he began writing his own from scratch in Python. It became a way to learn Discord development while creating something fun at the same time.
The very first version wasn't called Ghost at all. It was called Bennyware, a name inspired by a Minecraft hacked client. Bennyware was never intended to become a serious project, but it taught Benny everything from handling Discord events and writing commands to building authentication systems and understanding how Discord's API worked. Looking back, Bennyware wasn't particularly remarkable—but without it, Ghost would never have existed.
As the project evolved throughout 2021, Benny decided it deserved a better identity. He wasn't particularly fond of the name Bennyware and wanted something shorter, cleaner and easier to remember. That eventually became Ghost. Around the same time, the project received its own website at ghost.cool, a domain that quickly became part of Ghost's identity during its early years. Although the domain was only registered for a year before eventually expiring, many long-time users still remember it today.
Ghost originally launched as a completely free, invite-only selfbot. Rather than allowing anyone to join, Benny would occasionally release batches of around 10–20 invite keys inside the Discord server for existing members to hand out. This allowed the community to grow naturally while keeping it relatively small and close-knit. Before long, however, demand began to outgrow the invite system. People were constantly asking how they could gain access, and many even suggested charging for licences. Eventually Ghost transitioned to a paid model, initially costing just £2 for a lifetime licence before later increasing to around £5 as development continued. Even then, Ghost remained significantly cheaper than many competing selfbots, which commonly charged around £10 for lifetime access. That affordability became one of Ghost's defining characteristics and played a large part in its growth.
Throughout 2021, Ghost expanded rapidly. The command count grew to well over 200 commands, covering everything from automation and moderation to quality-of-life features and entertainment. By late 2021, the community had grown to roughly 300–400 users, making Ghost one of the more recognisable selfbots within the Discord selfbot scene. Although still a niche project compared to mainstream Discord bots, Ghost had earned its place alongside names such as Nighty, Rise and React.
Late 2021 would become the most significant turning point in Ghost's history.
Someone began abusing Nighty's API, sending messages containing phrases such as "use Ghost" and "Nighty sucks". To this day, Benny has no idea who was responsible, and it certainly wasn't him. However, Nighty's staff believed Ghost was behind the attacks. Around the same time, Ghost itself contained a serious security flaw—its hardware ID (HWID) verification was performed entirely client-side, making it possible to bypass licence validation. Eventually the application was cracked and Ghost's private source code leaked. During the fallout, Benny was also doxxed by individuals associated with the Nighty community, with his real identity being publicly exposed.
Rather than attempting to continue selling software whose source code had already become public, Benny decided to release Ghost's source code on GitHub himself. The repository quickly surpassed 100 GitHub stars, demonstrating that there was still significant interest in the project. However, almost immediately afterwards, Benny disappeared completely from the selfbot community. There were no more announcements, no commits, no Discord messages and no public interaction of any kind. He even adopted a completely different online alias. From the outside, Ghost appeared to have ended overnight.
Over the following years, Ghost slowly faded into history. The original public repository was eventually removed during late 2022 or early 2023, and for anyone following the project, there was no reason to believe it would ever return. Behind the scenes, there was no secret development or public roadmap. Ghost simply no longer existed as an active project.
During 2023, Benny quietly returned under his current online identity. By this point he had gained considerably more experience with Python and, more importantly, had become comfortable with discord.py's Cog system. Compared with the architecture of the original Ghost, Cogs provided a dramatically cleaner way to organise larger projects. Rather than attempting to continue the original codebase, Benny made the decision to rebuild Ghost almost entirely from scratch. Only a handful of commands from the original project survived into what would become the rewrite, while almost everything else was redesigned around modular cogs, reusable utility files and a much cleaner project structure. The new project was created under the GhostSelfbot GitHub organisation, marking a fresh beginning rather than a continuation of the original repository.
Around the same time, Discord removed the ability for user accounts to send rich embeds, forcing selfbot developers to find creative alternatives. Having recently been learning Python Pillow, Benny experimented with generating image-based embeds instead. The result was Ghost's custom image embed utility, capable of producing visually appealing embeds rendered as images rather than relying on Discord's now-restricted embed system. The utility proved successful enough that Benny shared it with the Rise selfbot community, becoming one of the first standout features of the rewrite and demonstrating Ghost's new focus on building original solutions rather than simply recreating old functionality.
After roughly a year of redevelopment, the Ghost V3 Rewrite was publicly released on 26 October 2024. Although labelled as Version 3, it was effectively the beginning of an entirely new generation of Ghost. The original monolithic, single-file architecture had been replaced with a modular design based around discord.py Cogs, making the project significantly easier to maintain, extend and contribute to. The following day, Ghost was officially reintroduced to the wider selfbot community through Reddit, marking its first public appearance after nearly three years of silence.
Development continued steadily throughout 2025, culminating in the release of Ghost V4. While V3 established the new architecture, V4 focused heavily on improving the user experience. One of the biggest additions was Ghost's modern desktop GUI, built using ttkbootstrap. What originally began as experiments with Tkinter gradually evolved into a polished interface that barely resembled a traditional Tkinter application. The GUI made Ghost far more approachable while laying the foundations for even more ambitious features in future releases.
Today, Ghost is maintained very differently from its original commercial counterpart. Although it began life as a paid selfbot, Benny has deliberately chosen to keep the modern project completely open source. Having experienced source-code leaks, commercial competition and personal harassment, he has little interest in returning to the paid selfbot market. Instead, Ghost is maintained as a long-term passion project, with new features arriving whenever they are genuinely enjoyable to build rather than because customers expect them. Development is slower than during Ghost's commercial years, but it is also far more sustainable.
Looking ahead, Ghost's vision extends well beyond simply being another Discord selfbot. One of the long-term ambitions is to continue expanding the desktop GUI into a complete control centre capable of managing almost every aspect of Ghost without relying on the command line. Benny has also expressed interest in eventually developing a cloud dashboard, allowing users to monitor and control Ghost remotely. Alongside these larger goals, Ghost continues to receive regular maintenance, architectural improvements and new features whenever inspiration strikes.
Ghost has lived several very different lives. It began as a hobby project created simply to learn Discord development, grew into one of the better-known commercial selfbots of its time, disappeared almost overnight following a source leak and doxxing incident, and eventually returned years later as a completely open-source project built on an entirely new foundation. More than anything else, Ghost reflects the growth of its creator. What started as a simple experiment has become a project spanning more than five years, surviving setbacks that would have ended many others. Today, Ghost continues to evolve—not because it has to, but because its creator still enjoys building it.
Hey, if you’ve made it this far, thanks for checking out Ghost.
This project started out as a little side thing, and it grew way bigger than I expected. I made a lot of mistakes with the original Ghost, especially around security, and the whole Nighty situation was rough. But it also pushed me to learn, take a step back, and come back stronger.
The rewrite means a lot to me, it’s something I built with actual thought and structure behind it. It’s been tough to find time with uni and life, but I’m still here, still working on it when I can, and still excited about what Ghost is becoming.
Thanks again for stopping by, and I hope you find something useful (or cool) in this project.
– Benny