Hindrances and Circumventions on the Senior Capstone Project – The AI/ML BTC Trading Bot

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It is apparent that cryptocurrencies are in a murky state of legality and controversy around the world but especially in the United States of America. Whether they can be considered as securities or true investments is up to scrutiny. Needless to say, this has caused problems for our work-in-progress AI/ML Bitcoin Trading Bot. While my team and I have established the foundation for cleaning the data and have begun to train our bot, actually connecting to a main exchange in order to determine its real-time performance has been unexpectedly circuitous.

Binance US: The watered-down counterpart. Seemingly promising to test the bot in real-time

Binance is the world’s foremost cryptocurrency exchange, processing trades that amounted to over $70 billion in daily volume (24-hr period) on October 25, 2022. That staggering statistic can be corroborated here https://nomics.com/exchanges/binance. Naturally, this was the first exchange I wanted to establish an API for in order to connect the exchange with our bot. Unfortunately, the exchange is banned in the United States so therefore I settled for its stripped-down U.S. version, offering far less crypto pairs than its cosmopolitan main exchange. After setting up a U.S. account, creating API keys and extracting BTC historical data to the project, I was on top of the world. Since our bot’s training data spans the timeframe of January 1, 2012 to March 1, 2021, we could now build our basis for our bot’s test data. This test data would naturally span that March 1, 2021 until present. As one engaged with cryptocurrency may know, this is when a huge surge in volatility, volume and price took place. In other words, this was a rich environment for our extensively-trained bot to be put to the test. Little did I know that setback with working on Binance U.S. would await.

BitMEX – the alternative to Binance U.S. and my saving grace

Unfortunately due to its watered-down nature, Binance U.S. unfortunately does not permit paper trading and I was devastated. All the account and API creation was seemingly for nothing. Alternative crypto paper trading accounts options on TradingView and other exchanges were blocked with paywalls. Thankfully, I found a free paper trading option sponsored by the exchange BitMEX under its testnet program. I was relieved that the files and functioned I created to connect to specifically connect to the Binance API could be easily retooled for BitMEX’s.

Look at all the MOOLAH I can spend on crypto 😉

Things are looking good for the bot and determining its live-action performance now. Onto this next step and further success!