Welcome to the Hummingbot Bi-weekly, your regular dose of updates about new features 🤖, upcoming events 🎉, and announcements from our rapidly expanding community 👪! 

Hope this issue finds you and your ❤️loved ones safe and strong 💪. Subscribe to never miss any new issue.

🙋‍♂️ Note from our CEO: The Growing Hummingbot Ecosystem

Last year when we first launched Hummingbot, we envisioned an ecosystem in which anyone could contribute an exchange connector or trading strategy, enabling Hummingbot to develop into a modular, community-operated project that serves the entire crypto industry.

I’m happy to report that we’re getting closer to that reality. Today, Hummingbot supports 12 exchanges officially, but a number of external developers have also built Hummingbot forks for other exchanges. A few of these devs have joined our team full-time, while we work with other devs as close arms-length partners. In addition, over 60 external contributors have added features and fixed bugs in the core Hummingbot codebase.

We believe that an external developer ecosystem is the key to scaling the Hummingbot open source codebase. There are thousands of crypto exchanges, both centralized and decentralized, with more created every day. The only way that we can serve the entire industry is to build a modular architecture that enables anyone to contribute. That’s why we’re excited to begin formally supporting 3rd party developers in building connectors and other features for exchanges.

In order to ensure a high level of quality in the Hummingbot codebase, we are approaching this transition carefully. During the review process, we work with the connector developers to ensure that they meet the functional and code quality guidelines before merging them into the codebase. To ensure that our bandwidth is allocated to the most important places, we are rolling out governance to let our community to help us prioritize which exchanges to support and which features to build.

How to participate in the Hummingbot ecosystem

• Developers: Join the discussion on the #dev channels on our Discord

• Exchanges/Projects: Email us at partnerships@hummingbot.io to learn how to access the Hummingbot developer community

• Users: Read our governance recap and participate in the next round of voting

best,

Michael Feng (@fengtality)

🚀 Liquidity Mining is coming to KuCoin on Oct 5!

We’re incredibly excited to announce that we’re expanding Hummingbot Miner to KuCoin with initial campaigns for Harmony and Suku!

Since we launched on Binance in March, our team has been working hard to improve the accuracy, stability, and scalability of the system, finally allowing us to expand to more venues.

We are launching with a special open beta that rewards users with prizes as well as token rewards during a special 2-week period to test out the liquidity mining system on KuCoin.

Learn more

🗳️ Governance recap and next steps

Our first governance experiment to pick the next Hummingbot exchange integration resulted in over 3,700 votes, with Loopring winning over Beaxy and OKEx. However, the experience also taught us that we need to improve the governance system before round 2…

Learn more

🎓 [Hummingbot Academy] What is Arbitrage?

We’ve published the second article in our new Hummingbot Academy educational series: What is Arbitrage?

For new algorithmic traders, it’s important to understand the basics of the core trading strategies before building more sophisticated, complex strategies. That’s why we are focusing on explaining the core building blocks before discussing more advanced concepts.

We plan to publish a new Hummingbot Academy article every week, so bookmark the Academy tag on our blog to stay updated!

🎤 Upcoming Hummingbot events and talks

Our team will be representing Hummingbot at a number of (virtual) events over the next few weeks. Don’t miss out!

• September 29: Hummingbot and liquidity mining webinar for the Suku community will be hosted on zoom. We also welcome others from the Hummingbot community to join.
  Time: 5pm PDT / 8pm EDT
  https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86258719781

• October 16: Our CEO Michael will give a talk and demo on the new celo-arb Hummingbot strategy at Celo’s Tech Talk.

  REGISTER FOR FREE

• October 16-18: Hummingbot is one of the lead sponsors for #Liquidity2020, a community-organized conference on trading bots and liquidity! We’ll host a few different talks and workshops during the event.

  REGISTER FOR FREE

🍿 Crypto snacks

A curated list of recently-published content about crypto trading, #DeFi, and other topics that might be interesting for Hummingbot users and developers.

Introducing UNI: Congratulations to our friends at Uniswap for launching their UNI governance token and establishing a liquidity mining campaign to disseminate it. We also appreciate and thank them for helping to educate the market about how liquidity mining works:

“The formula accounts for LP liquidity on a per-second basis since the deployment of Uniswap v1, ensuring that rewards are weighted towards LPs that provided liquidity when total liquidity was low.”

Welcome to the Hummingbot Bi-weekly, your regular dose of updates about new features 🤖, upcoming events 🎉, and announcements from our rapidly expanding community 👪! 

Hope this issue finds you and your ❤️loved ones safe and strong 💪. Subscribe to never miss any new issue.

🚀 Shipped new Hummingbot v0.31.0!

Today we released v0.31.0 which features the new crypto.com connector along with an upgrade to the Bittrex connector that uses their new v3 API.

In addition, we’ve redesigned the connector architecture to simplify development by external developers and fixed a number of bugs.

See the release notes

🙋🏻‍♂️ Note from our CEO: Empowering our users

As you can see below, there’s a ton of exciting developments happening in the Hummingbot ecosystem. They may seem haphazard, but from our perspective, the common denominator is the theme of empowerment.

Our overarching goal with these initiatives is to provide more ways for our community to use, master, and influence the Hummingbot open source codebase. For instance:

• governance experiments to let you vote for the next Hummingbot connector and other features

• Hummingbot Academy, a blog series to teach you how to run various Hummingbot trading strategies

• monthly developer calls to support devs building on top of Hummingbot

• new connector architecture in v0.31 lets decentralized exchange protocols connect to Hummingbot the same way that centralized exchanges do today

This approach is borne out of necessity, not just altruism.

Every day, there’s a new design for a DeFi protocol or exchange, and it’s impossible for us to build all the integrations and strategies that our rapidly growing user base are requesting. The only way to serve the entire community is to empower the community to help us build Hummingbot.

best,

Michael Feng (@fengtality)

💥 New crypto.com connector and partnership

In addition to the new connector in the v0.31.0 release, we are excited to announce a partnership with crypto.com (CRO), the #11-ranked coin by market capitalization. This allows Hummingbot users to earn bonuses for trading on crypto.com’s exchange, as well as liquidity rewards from Hummingbot Miner campaigns in the future.

Read the announcement post

🎓 Introducing Hummingbot Academy

Market making, arbitrage, and other strategies can be daunting for new algo traders. Because education is critical, we’re starting a new blog series called Hummingbot Academy aimed at giving our users practical, hands-on advice about various trading strategies. Hopefully, these articles will help you understand how these strategies work, what the main risks are, and how to apply them with Hummingbot.

We’ll drop articles in this series approximately once per week - see the first one below!

Read the post

🗳️ Results of first Hummingbot governance experiment

We ran a governance experiment to let the community decide on the next Hummingbot connector. Congratulations to Loopring for winning the vote, and thank you to all the folks from Beaxy and OKEx who participated in the process.

We're aware that there were a lot of bumps with this first governance experiment, especially with the bot votes on Discord and the confusion around the poll end time. On one hand, the level of enthusiasm from the community to influence the Hummingbot roadmap has been amazing, but we clearly have to build a better voting experience. More details coming soon…

💰 New XZC rewards + $50 minimum payout for ERC-20 rewards

Starting next week, the ZCoin campaigns on Hummingbot Miner will pay out rewards in their native XZC token. To earn these rewards, miners should add a XZC wallet address (either a ZCoin wallet or Binance deposit address) to their Miner accounts.

This change is triggered in part by high gas prices in Ethereum, which cause simple ERC-20 token transfers to cost as much as $10. Due to these high transaction costs, we are raising the minimum payout for ERC-20 reward tokens to $50.

Read more

💻 Monthly developer call recap

Recently, we held the inaugural Hummingbot developer call, a monthly call to support and answer questions from external developers who are building on top of Hummingbot.

See below for a Reddit post with links to various parts of the recorded discussion, as well as info on how to join the next one.

Watch the recording

🎤 Upcoming Hummingbot events and talks

Our team will be representing Hummingbot at a number of (virtual) events over the next few weeks. Don’t miss out!

• September 11: Deconstructing Derivatives: Our COO Carlo will be speaking on a panel about liquidity at Vega Protocol’s event

• September 18: Celo Tech Talk: Our CEO Michael will give a talk and demo about the celo-arb Hummingbot strategy

• October 16-18: #Liquidity2020: Hummingbot is the lead sponsor for a community-organized conference on trading bots and liquidity!

🍿 Crypto snacks

A curated list of recently-published content about crypto trading, #DeFi, and other topics that might be interesting for Hummingbot users and developers.

Trade-offs in the Decentralized BitMEX Space: In this comprehensive post, Multicoin Capital analyzes the designs and tradeoffs of the various decentralized derivative exchange projects out there.

SushiSwap Set to Drain Nearly $1 Billion From Rival Uniswap: The twists and turns in the ongoing SushiSwap soap opera continue. This will probably be a David Fincher movie one day.

Welcome to the Hummingbot Bi-weekly, your regular dose of updates about new features 🤖, upcoming events 🎉, and announcements from our rapidly expanding community 👪! 

Hope this issue finds you and your ❤️loved ones safe and strong 💪. Subscribe to never miss any new issue.

🙋🏻‍♂️ Note from our CEO: Jungles vs Gardens

Open source projects face a conundrum.

A project can accommodate many user requests and freely merge in external contributions. But the risk is that it becomes poorly documented or broken over time, resulting in a tangled mess that frustrates new users, like a jungle that requires a machete to hack through.

On the other hand, a project can limit the number of features and focus on making sure that these features are well tested and documented. However, the risk in this approach is that the project doesn’t move fast enough to accommodate the needs of its user base and eventually becomes superseded by other projects or even a fork of the same project. These projects are like a small, well-maintained garden: a pleasant experience for a small subset of users, but unable to serve the broader community.

We’ve struggled with this conundrum for a long time. On one hand, we want to be able to serve every exchange, protocol, and fund in crypto, especially the long tail of smaller players who deserve a fair shot at competing with the big players. There are already over 100 outstanding user requests on our public roadmap. But we also know that Hummingbot’s main differentiation from other open source trading bots is our focus on ease of use, support, and community.

Should we think of Hummingbot as a jungle or a garden?

This conundrum isn’t unique to Hummingbot. Many open source projects have to balance supporting the broader user base and enabling external contribution versus keeping the code quality and documentation bar high.

While we don’t know what the right solution is, we’re hopeful that our recently announced initiatives will help. We’re starting to let the community shape our roadmap by voting for the next Hummingbot connector. Also, we are rolling out more resources for developers who want to build on top of the Hummingbot open source framework, such as dedicated channels and a monthly developer call.

Over time, we hope to solve the Jungle vs Garden conundrum by turning Hummingbot into an open source codebase that is truly owned, operated, and maintained by the community.

✅ Vote for the next Hummingbot connector!

As announced in this blog post, we are taking the first step in decentralizing governance by letting the community select the next exchange to be integrated into Hummingbot.

Check out this Reddit thread below for info about the 3 candidates (Beaxy, Loopring, OKEx) and how to vote.

Learn how to vote

🏗️ Build any trading strategy on top of Hummingbot!

We recently announced more resources for developers, including:

• Dedicated Discord channels

• Monthly developer call

• Better docs for developers

Learn more

💵 Introducing native token rewards for iExec (and Zcoin soon!)

Hummingbot liquidity miners may have seen our recent announcement that we are now paying out rewards in iExec’s native RLC token instead of USDC for all RLC pairs (see below).

This has been an oft-requested feature from our campaign sponsors, and we believe that letting sponsors pay in their native tokens will lead to larger reward pools and more opportunities for miners in the future.

In a few weeks, we will convert the Zcoin campaign to paying out their native XZC token as rewards as well, followed by other tokens.

Learn more

🍿 Crypto snacks

A curated list of recently-published content about crypto trading, #DeFi, and other topics that might be interesting for Hummingbot users and developers

🧪 Strike Protocol is now Perpetual Protocol! PERP is a new AMM-based decentralized derivatives exchange. We’ve known this team for a few years now and have been impressed with their grit in experimenting with different use cases and business models.

🍠 FTX Uniswap Index: The CoinDesk headline is that FTX is creating a DeFi index to give traders a way to get broad-based DeFi exposure, but the more interesting thing is that this index is algorithmically defined using only public, transparent smart contract data. Index construction and maintenance can be highly manual and inefficient, so this is a novel approach.

Welcome to the Hummingbot Bi-weekly, your regular dose of updates about new features 🤖, upcoming events 🎉, and announcements from our rapidly expanding community 👪! 

Hope this issue finds you and your ❤️loved ones safe and strong 💪. Subscribe to never miss any new issue.

🚀 Shipped new Hummingbot v0.30.0 with new commands!

Today’s release of version 0.30.0 features a number of new commands, including order_book (shown above) and others. Also, we have simplified and refactored Hummingbot exchange connectors to make it easier for other developers to add new connectors.

See the release notes

🙋🏻‍♂️ Note from our CEO: Supporting external connectors, part 2

Hi bot-runners,

As some of you may know, we originally ran a quant hedge fund. We built Hummingbot because we were frustrated by the amount of time we had to spend on low-level exchange integrations. It was a lot more fun and exciting to develop and train new strategies, but instead we were spending way too much time building and maintaining exchange integrations. Since our friends at other quant funds were doing the same thing, we thought there should be a professional-grade public utility that all algorithmic traders could use and not waste time on exchange integrations.

Fast-forward to today, and Hummingbot now officially supports 11 exchanges, both centralized and decentralized. But we’re also aware of many Hummingbot forks out there, built by exchanges, funds, and traders for their own use (example: Loopring’s fork)

We are incredibly grateful for these contributions, so we are launching a process to start accepting these contributions into the Hummingbot codebase. For each connector, we will undergo a thorough review before approving it into the codebase, in order to maintain a consistent level of quality.

To ensure that we’re spending our review bandwidth on useful connectors, we’ll let the Hummingbot community to vote for which connectors we review and approve next. In the meantime, anyone who has a working Hummingbot connector can contact me on Discord or Twitter if you would to get it merged into the open source codebase.

best,
Michael Feng
@fengtality

✨ New feature: Magic-powered email login

In the Hummingbot Miner app, we have replaced the Ethereum address-based login with email-based login, powered by our friends at Magic.

This should be easier for liquidity miners to use, while under the hood, Magic uses elliptic curve cryptography and HSMs to ensure security. Here’s a blog post we wrote about how it works.

Try it out!

⚖️ Comparing liquidity mining options in DeFi vs. Hummingbot

We are excited to see liquidity mining as a general concept being adopted across DeFi! While each implementation is different, the common thread is using algorithmic incentives to reward the community to provide liquidity, rather than a single firm.

Since there are many nuances to liquidity mining applied to order book exchanges (our model) versus liquidity mining on automatic market makers (Balancer, Curve etc), so our COO Carlo wrote a blog post comparing them.

Read the post

【新】Discord 中文支援渠道

We recently launched a 中文 (Mandarin Chinese) support channel on our Discord server. Along with our Mandarin wiki on Github, this channel should help Mandarin speakers all over the world get the help and information they need to start using Hummingbot.

Go to the Hummingbot Discord

🎤 Hummingbot talk at FutureProof on August 23

Our CEO Michael will be giving a talk at the #FutureProof virtual conference about Hummingbot and building trading bots generally. The Hummingbot talk will be at 9:30pm PST Friday August 22 (12:30pm Saturday August 23 in Singapore/Hong Kong). Don’t miss it!

See conference details

🍿 Crypto snacks

A curated list of recently-published content about crypto trading, #DeFi, and other topics that might be interesting for Hummingbot users and developers

🧪 Introducing Project Serum: Serum is a new Solana-based decentralized derivatives exchange built by FTX. We’re excited to see a new option for traders and will hopefully support Serum with a Hummingbot connector in the future.

🍠 YAM: An Experiment in Fair Farming, Governance, and Elasticity: Building upon the governance principles of YFI and the elastic supply of AMPL, YAM is a new experiment in decentralized finance created by some of our DeFi friends.

Welcome to the Hummingbot Bi-weekly, your regular dose of updates about new features 🤖, upcoming events 🎉, and announcements from our rapidly expanding community 👪! 

Hope this issue finds you and your ❤️loved ones safe and strong 💪. Subscribe to never miss any new issue.

🙋🏻‍♂️ Note from our CEO: Supporting external Hummingbot connectors

In the last few months, we’ve seen an explosion of exchanges, both centralized and decentralized, building Hummingbot connectors. External developers are working on OKEx, crypto.com, and HitBTC connectors now. In addition, Loopring, BitPanda, and Beaxy have developed Hummingbot forks with their own connectors.

We’re incredibly grateful for all the contributions. This was what we envisioned when we started Hummingbot over a year ago, out of frustration from spending countless hours debugging low-level API connectivity when we ran a quant fund.

However, we also have ensure that our limited support and testing bandwidth isn’t consumed with reviewing external connectors. Also, we should provide clearer documentation, better support, and more transparency around what the review process entails for the developers who are building Hummingbot connectors.

With the v0.30 release, we plan to announce a program to support external developers who are building Hummingbot connectors, along with certifying connectors and merging them into the codebase.

This is the just the first step; over time, we plan to give more control and governance over the codebase to our community.

best,
Michael Feng
@fengtality

👩 Top liquidity miner interview with Vik

We are excited to interview top liqudity miner Vik, an microelectronics engineer based in Russia. Learn how she makes 5-7% per week liquidity mining! A

Also, check out the awesome trade performance calculator that she contributed to the Hummingbot community.

Read the post

🍓 How to run Hummingbot on a Raspberry Pi 4

Since Hummingbot doesn’t need to be run on a powerful computer but does benefit greatly from an uninterrupted network connector, running Hummingbot on a Raspberry Pi 4 is a perfect fit for our hobbyist users as an alternative to cloud servers.

We’ve written a guide that shows you how to install Hummingbot on a Raspberry Pi. Thanks to community member Punkhead for the original Reddit post that inspired this blog post.

Read the post

📈 Increase in spread constant from 4 to 8

After discussions with miners and traders in our community, we have decided to revise the spread density function constant used in Hummingbot Miner for all markets, starting in today’s weekly period.

This should increase rewards for placing orders with tighter spreads vs those placed at wider spreads:

See the Reddit post for more details.

🔥 COTI liquidity mining campaign launched

We are excited to announce that we have launched a new liquidity mining campaign for COTI, an innovative project that helps enterprises deploy stablecoin-based payment solutions!

This campaign will run for 3 months and feature $750/week in rewards available for market makers in the COTI/BTC, COTI/USDT, and COTI/BNB pairs on Binance.

Start mining now

🍿 Crypto snacks

A curated list of recently-published content about crypto trading, #DeFi, and other topics that might be interesting for Hummingbot users and developers:

YFI A Tale of Fair Launch, Governance and Value: The hot new thing in DeFi currently is a token called YFI, a token designed by developer and friend of Hummingbot Andrew Cronje. This Deribit article does a great job of explaining how it works.

First Mover: This DeFi-Ready Token Is Teaching Crypto Traders to Cherish Inflation: Our upcoming liquidity mining partner Ampleforth has seen their AMPL token explode from $5m to $350m+ market cap in the last few weeks. AMPL has an innovative design that algorithmically rebases supply based on price changes. Learn how AMPL works before you start trading it.

Introducing DerivaDEX — a Next-Generation Decentralized Exchange for Derivatives: We’re excited about this new decentralized derivatives exchange launched by former professional quants.

💬 Get involved!

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