How to create a Cryptocurrency Trading Bot in Node.js

This tutorial will go through the process of creating a trading bot for Cryptocurrency using Node.js. The tutorial will focus on three Cryptocurrencies, Ether, Bitcoin & Litecoin. First, we’ll look at how to create a wallet for each of these currencies using the Coinbase API, and then add code in to successfully create transactions, finishing with a simple yet well known trading algorithm that also considers trading fee’s and 1 day rolling historical data. Once we’ve created our service, we’ll set it live with test money to see how it does, followed by real cash at the end.

Overview

Project Introduction:

This tutorial will go through the process of creating a trading bot for Cryptocurrency using Node.js. The tutorial will focus on Bitcoin as our currency of choice. First, we’ll look at how to create a wallet for each of these currencies using the Coinbase API, and then add code in to successfully create transactions, finishing with a simple yet well known trading algorithm that also considers trading fee’s and 90 day rolling historical data. Once we’ve created our service, we’ll set it live with test money to see how it does, followed by real cash at the end.

What are the requirements?

To get the most out of the tutorial, viewers should have some basic knowledge or understanding of:

Javascript
Nodejs
MongoDB or NOSQL
Docker

What is the target audience? Anyone who wishes to learn more about:

Algorithmic trading
Bitcoin
APIs
Nodejs
MongoDB

When are the streaming sessions (streaming schedule)?

Weekly 2pm EST New York time on Tuesday, Thursday

Project Outline

Update:

since starting this project I've learnt better ways to implement. Therefore, I will be starting again with the course over the next coming weeks with improvements to the trading bot and a new project following on from what we discovered up to Session 4.

Thanks for bearing with me!

Session 1: Setting-up the Project

Looking at the starter point for our node project, obtaining a Coinbase API key and making our first request to the API.

Getting a Coinbase API key
Using the Coinbase API key with the coinbase package
Obtaining Bitcoin Prices
Setting up a daemon using Forever

Session 2: Exchange Prices

Now we begin to look at pricing data, we want to store prices for a period of time and collect a price index at a specific interval. We can also use historical data provided by CoinDesk to start off our algorithm.

Store Bitcoin prices in our database
Retrieve a rolling window of prices given a date
Find min, max, median & mode in our rolling windows

Session 3: Trading Algorithm

In this session we'll discuss trading algorithms and the various methods used in the industry, then implement one or two of the most used algorithm for our use case with Bitcoin. Once that's done, we'll run our algorithm against some historical data and see what happens.

Looking at various trading algorithms
Implementing one or two commonly used trading algorithms
Testing our trading algorithms

Session 4: Transactions

Once we're confident our algorithm is producing results we'd like to see, we'll start to look at applying transactions using the Coinbase API. We'll also take into account Service fees in order to make sure we are running at a profit.

Creating and retrieving a bitcoin Wallet
Costing service fees
Applying our algorithm into a desired buy and sell price
Registering our transaction with coinbase

Session 5: Deployment

It's time to deploy! In this session we'll load our trading bot into Docker and then begin to run it in the cloud via Digital Ocean using a virtual wallet.

Creating a Docker image
Uploading onto Digital Ocean
Running our app with a virtual wallet & currency

Session 6: Results & Overview

We'll review the results of our virtual wallet and see if we made a profit or loss, if we made a profit, we'll start up with some real money and see how it does.

Look at the results of our test data app and see how well we did
Run with a live wallet if all went well.