Hummingbot Bi-weekly #42
Introducing community voting, more developer resources, & more!
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approach is that the project doesn’t move fast enough to accommodate the needs of its user base and eventually becomes superseded by other projects or even a fork of the same project.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.
🏗️ 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
💵 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.
🍿 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.