[hummel]

I'm the CTO of a crypto hedge fund since 2014. If you are newb and want to start working with bots/algos/signals; I must advice you that when I started on early 2014, it was already late for deploying HFT. Also you compete against the frontrunning happening inside the exchanges, so traditional finance tools don't translate to crypto very well. Took me between 4-6 years to refine a valid strategy that is able to move thousands of coins at the same time and beat the crypto market on any condition. This is probably one of the hardest thing I ever did. So if you expect to make money with open source, algos, strategies, you still very far from the objective.

[chasebank]

Our PHD quant spent his first 5 years at a prop shop, 7 years at CME, 5 at Trading Technologies before consulting. He said it took him his entire career to realize that the name of the game is risk management, not seeking alpha. Happy to pay his $500/hr for lessons learned. Worth his weight in gold.

[throwaway77384]

It's funny, I played around on the platform kryll.io for some time. It's a place where you can use decision blocks in a drag and drop manner to compose strategies.

They have a marketplace where people can share strategies, etc.

The marketplace always shows these massive returns, like "30% over the last week on BTC/USDT". Nowhere do they make it clear that this includes the natural evolution of the market (lol). Worse, if a bot / strategy works for many different pairs, it cherry-picks the one that happened to have good returns that week.

So far as I can tell, there are no strategies on the entire platform that outperform a bull market and in a bear market the strategies were always way too slow to pick up on things crashing.

It turned into a gigantic pyramid-scheme style scam, where the fanciest imagery / language for your BS strategy was what determined how many people ended up using it. Of course you get a cut of the user's fees paid for trading.

Honestly, the whole crypto-trading world seems incredibly dishonest.

If kryll actually had a working product, they would advertise gains above the natural evolution of the market and gains in bear markets.

They would also only charge fees on strategy profits. They do neither.

Another issue I ran into quickly, is the incredibly opaque fee model of many exchanges.

Take Binance: They will tell you the fees you paid for the last 3 months only, there is no place anywhere in the app or the website where they just tell you your cumulative spend on fees. And the 3 month fee CSV you can download has the fees in the cryptos traded, using their value AT THE TIME OF TRADING. So if you want to figure out the fees you paid, you have to build a thing that back-traces what a given crypto was worth at the time and calculate it from that.

With bot-trading, I can tell you that that gets real complicated real quick.

It's such a shame that so much of the crypto world relies on people being uninformed. I myself am a huge crypto fan and have done well just by holding. Trading hasn't worked out for me yet. I remain skeptical it ever will.

[leppr]

> It's such a shame that so much of the crypto world relies on people being uninformed.

You can extend that take to almost all of DeFi yield farming as well. APYs almost always rely either on a greater fool buying the useless governance tokens (which almost always trend down in price), or on late-comers paying entrance/exit taxes to early entrants. That's without even going into the tokens whose central mechanics are merely about disguising Ponzi schemes (Fei, Safemoon, Hex, to name only the billion dollar+ ones).

I'm also a die-hard crypto fan, but having to constantly look out for Ponzis around every corner is tiring.

[ketamine__]

The elephant in the room with DeFi is always the underlying asset. It’s like being your own bank (but only if your bank vaporizes your balance every so often).

[capableweb]

> but only if your bank vaporizes your balance every so often

What you mean here exactly? I've been doing DeFi stuff for almost a year (Ethereum) and my "balance" has never been "reset". You must be doing something very wrong if that keeps happening to you.

[ketamine__]

There is the risk of impermanent loss with providing liquidity and the risk of the underlying asset. Thinking this is anything like a bank account is a big mistake.

[capableweb]

Sure, risks exist everywhere. But you claimed "but only if your bank vaporizes your balance every so often" which when read seems to indicate that your balance gets reset randomly/at a set interval, which couldn't be further from the truth.

Also, no one ever said DeFi is like a normal bank account. In fact, the biggest feature of cryptocurrencies and DeFi is exactly that it's not a bank account. It's likely the top reason people are involved in the first place.

[zomglings]

I'm curious about the frontrunning.

How much of it is based on social dynamics/having access to the right social networks vs. monitoring transactions vs. monitoring mempool/transaction pool?