Algorithmic trading is something that I’m incredibly excited about. So much so that I’ve spent the last 3 years building an algorithmic crypto trading platform alongside a small team of developers.
After all this work, I’m supper happy to say that out trading platform — AESIR is live and growing! The app is still very young and likely missing some features, but we’ve seen decent growth in the last few months and that makes me very excited about the future of Aesir.
Algorithmic trading is an iterative process that consists of identifying and building a strategy, measure the results, and then making adjustments.
It’s only after learning what doesn’t work, that you can start having an idea of what may work. I feel this is one rule of algorithmic trading that most people who are just starting are unaware of.
The secret sauce is experimenting, analysing your results and then experimenting some more.
This is exactly why I spent my time building this platform. Aesir was designed to let users easily build, deploy and test their crypto trading bots, using an intuitive interface. Aesir has built in paper trading so you can actually deploy bots on the live market but have it place dummy orders just to understand how your bot would perform on the real market.
We use real time data so the tests are as accurate as they can possibly get, without mocking an orderbook.
Some Backstory
It wasn’t until March 2021 that I decided to open source one of the bots that I had been working on — the Binance Volatility Trading Bot (BVTB).
The idea behind this bot is that it would help you detect cryptocurrencies that are just about to moon by constantly analysing all coins on Binance. The bot would look at the price change in % over a certain period of time, and if any coin breaks that threshold — it would buy it.
So — for instance you could Build trading strategies that work like this:
BUY any coin on Binance that gains more than 4% within 2 minutes.
From here on, all that was left to do was run multiple bots at the same time and figure out what the sweet spot is in the current market. I shared my idea, and tool on Reddit and it went nuts. The project has over 3000 starts on GitHub and it’s still available today.
As months went by, a group of core devs was informally created that would maintain the tool and add new features. But one of the big limitations of the BVT bot was that it wasn’t really easy to use, or run. You’d need to be willing to have your computer run 24/7 or have access to a Raspberry Pi.
That’s when we decided we’d turn this into a SaaS, and thus trading platform Aesir was born.
Building an algo crypto trading bot platform
Going from a python script you can run locally, to a scalable web application with user authentication is a completely different ball game. One that I would not have been able to pull off without the amazing team that we established in the early BVTB days.
We had numerous conversations on Reddit and Discord trying to understand what features people want the most, and how we can innovate on the formula. With a roadmap in mind, it was time to figure out how to actually build an application that scales.
We’re 6 months in and it turned out that Python is an absolute memory hog and makes the application extremely inefficient to run at scale — not to mention slow.
It was back to the drawing board and I was pretty much hands off the engine at this point and instead moved to front end. The engine was now in the hands of our capable backend devs, who decided on converting the it to C#.
C# is great for memory management and speed, so it was no surprise that our core was running lean, more than 50% leaner in fact.
Aesir Core features
Fast forward to today and we have a growing community of about 2k members on Discord, and just over 2.4k on Reddit (you’re welcome to join us on there!).
We officially released Aesir in May last year, making it just over 10 months old! Since then, we’ve been focusing on adding new features and improving existing ones. Today, although still very young, Aesir offers some of the best crypto trading bots on the market.
Here are some of the highlights:
Social Hub
The Social Hub shows you the top configurations that other traders have created, along with their overall profitability split by 30, 60 and 90 days. If a configuration is public, users can Clone it and use it themselves with a single click.
Visual Bot Builder
The visual builder takes you through a step by step process, helping you easily build your own crypto trading bot from scratch. It allows you to set the logic and behavior of your trading bot from the amount you spend per trade, to your trailing stop loss and the signals to look for.
The visual builder allows you to choose between 3 main logic layers: Volscan, Computed Indicators and Advanced.
Volscan is basically the volatility scanner of the BVTB that I mentioned earlier in the article. It analyses a % change over a window of time, and buys any coin (or just the ones specified) that reaches that thresholds.
Computed Indicators uses TradingView indicators in order to easily build and act on trading signals. Simply select the indicators you want to analyse, and the bot will place buy orders when some of them return a buy signal.
The Advanced layer allows your to build complex conditional logic based on Indicators or kline data.
Advanced Exit Strategy
A good exit strategy is instrumental for every good trading bot, and we’ve been building some unique exit strategy features to give users an edge.
The first feature we’ve added is simply called Stale Asset Selloff and it lets you select a time limit that when reached, the trading bot will automatically sell stale assets. This works in combination with Trailing Stop Loss and Trailing Take Profit.
Some strategies are only effective if the asset moves in the predicted direction within a certain time window. For instance, trading based on the Golden Cross pattern assumes that the chart will continue to move up.
If the 50 day SMA goes back down below the 200 day SMA, the setup has lost its efficiency and you probably want to close the position.
Stale asset selloff allows you to do just that.
Another way to close down underperforming positions on Aesir is what we call Stop Loss and Take Profit Decay. This lets you gradually reduce your TP and SL in time, so that it becomes tighter, and thus more likely to close.
For instance, if you’ve set your TP and SL to 20% and you have a Decay of 50% every day, you’ll basically reduce your TP and SL in half every day.
Decay is useful when an asset just isn’t really moving at the rate that you’re expecting so automatically decaying your TP and SL, will help that order to close, and free up liquidity so the bot may place other orders.
On top of these, we have some big news lined up for later this year, so stay tuned! Sign up to Aesir | Join the Discord
Thank you for reading!
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