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Show HN: I learned to code and built a crypto analytics platform (tradingdigits.io)

108 points by buckwhitzer ↗ HN
Hey everyone!

I am an enthusiast trader and a year ago I had this idea to create a free-to-use website that would feature all the most essential tools that traders would use on a daily basis.

So I learned to code and build it—I did everything including design, texts, code, and SEO—which took me 12 months to launch and a year and a half to make it look like it currently does.

I was into marketing and design before, but I didn't know barely anything about coding. The website is built using Next.js, Tailwind CSS, and Typescript with Framer Motion animations and lots of APIs.

I’m actively working on the project and in the following months I will release a huge update that will feature a renewed interface and access to real time on chain data and analytics.

Feel free to ask any questions and thanks a lot for reading this, it means a lot to me. Any feedback and your opinions would be highly appreciated.

84 comments

[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 159 ms ] thread
buckwhitzer
If there are some other crypto analytics tools or calculators that you'd like to see on the website please let me know and I'll include it in the list of things to code.
Galanwe
Make it point in time, add an API, more data, and sell a registration fee.
buckwhitzer
What do you mean saying point in time?

I will definitely be adding more onchain and quite specific data in Q4 this year and Q1 2024.

However, I'm planning to keep the product free and there will be no need to sign up if you don't want to.

Some really specific onchain data and analytics will be free only up to a point (limited number of indicators or coins and so on) and people will be able to pay a monthly fee to get access to data without limitations.

A proprietary API yet is a good idea, but I'm not really a backend guy so I'll need to learn quite a few things before setting that goal.

Galanwe
"point in time" means there should be a way to query past data _as it was_ in the past.
chompychop
This is pretty cool! :) What resources did you find most helpful in your learning journey?
buckwhitzer
Thanks so much! Most definitely can recommend scrimba.com, it's basically the only resource I used. I took a paid Frontend Developer Career Path, but there are lots of free courses too.
ladberg
FYI minor bug: if you sort the exchanges table, within a few seconds it'll refresh and go back to the original ranking
buckwhitzer
Thank you for noting that! I just checked and yes, the table gets rerendered upon data refetching every 60 seconds, resetting the table sorting.

Will fix it in this month's update, which will be released in around two weeks together with new Wallet Tracker tool and other improvements.

mark_mart
Curious what would Wallet Tracker feature does?
buckwhitzer
You can paste any wallet address (ERC-20, BTC or TRC-20) and it will provide you analytics about this wallet's holdings. Which tokens and how much it holds, its total value, 24H and 7D change, mcaps, and all of that. Up to 10 wallets and without any signing up or all of this stuff.
Gibson_v1
awesome. i'm trying to get better at coding myself and going to try a financial project soon. i wanted to do something with the current earnings reports coming out but that'll probably have to wait til next quarter at the rate i'm moving
buckwhitzer
Just do it bit by bit and eventually it will get done faster thank you think. I'm working on this since May 2022 so it's been a massively long road.

Good luck, man!

root_axis
fading transition animation is fine when clicking around, but it's an antipattern in the back button.
buckwhitzer
Thanks for the feedback, I'd never have noticed it myself. I kind of normalized it. Will fix it in this month's update.
ge96
Props for picking up TypeScript
Nevermark
Might be nice to be able to include crypto relevant stocks or funds.

Might be beyond your scope, but any tax estimates regarding sale decisions is always helpful, and can save some grief.

That is a serious request, though I don’t recommend anyone else doing this.

But the legitimate context here is a crypto tool, so here is my use case:

Microstrategy’s market cap reflects a growing fortune in Bitcoin, as well as its business value. The result is it’s share price can both magnify & buffer Bitcoin changes on different time scales.

(If anyone does ever invest in anything highly volatile, I recommend (1) you don’t, (2) if you do, learn everything you can about the security, market, political, social, technological, and key player contexts, (3) constantly pay attention to changes in context & events, (4) only do this with a small fraction of your money, and if you lose it - stop!)

That being said, IRA’s, with their lack of tax implications, vastly simplify investment change decisions, by removing tax timing and loss issues. This is tremendously helpful for volatile type investments, because transaction timing constraints and house vigs (taxes) both significantly magnify risks.

I really wish there was a time-agnostic way to invest for taxed accounts. Like taxes that reflected the time between a purchase & sale so that taxes did not create perverse incentives for timing purchases or sales.

Dancing around non-neutral tax implications creates a terrible drag on performance & adds headaches to straightforward rational value analysis.

TLDR: Don’t read anything I wrote! Max out your tax protected retirement plans every year, and invest all funds cautiously and diversely!

And thanks for sharing your project!

buckwhitzer
Thank you for your comment and for the advice! I was thinking to add both crypto and stocks heatmap in the future.
withinboredom
I wrote an arbitrage bot and gave it $100 ... then promptly forgot about it. Several years later, when I stumbled across it, still faithfully running on my server, it had nearly 11 million worth of coins. I opened the project and had it start shuffling everything off to bitcoin, slowly, over days/weeks to bitcoin. I was going to just cash out.

Well, it turns out that when I originally wrote the code, time was calculated in milliseconds, not seconds. So, when I thought I calculated out 17 days, it was like half an hour-ish. It caused a small crash trying to dump everything almost all at once, on some of the alt-coin markets, and lost almost all the money.

I walked away with ~$700.

I was literally in tears, as I went from so excited and I'm going to "just retire" ... to just as broke as I was an hour prior. The emotional roller-coaster of euphoria, to 'oh shit, what did I do!?', to 'well ... fuck' was not fun.

Anyway, good luck. There might be a lesson in there, but mostly, be careful where the intersection of money and programming lie.

timack
11,000,000 to ~700? -- I'd call that more than a "small crash".
mm263
How exactly did 11 million dollars turn to 600?
withinboredom
Easy, you have 1000s of some shit-coins, where if you sell it off slowly, you'll get a reasonable value for it. However, if you try to sell it quickly ... you'll eat through any reasonable value in minutes. For example, say you have 100 coins. There are 20 people willing to give you 100 bucks, so you sell them to those people, then there are 50 people willing to give you 50 bucks, and the rest are willing to give you 10 bucks. We'd call the 50 people willing to give you 50 bucks 'resistance' (at least that is what it is called in FTX-land). So, I cash out for (20 * 100)+(50 * 50)+(30 * 10) = $4,800. A nice slow sell-off could result in selling the whole 100 coins for $100, or $1,000,000, whereas dumping it, like in this example, can result in "losing" a ton of "potential cash." I was dealing with volatile coins, so often there was very little resistance (if any) to retain any kind of value.
buckwhitzer
Sorry to hear that! I am being pretty cautious when trading lately whilst the website is pure independent analytics and doesn't require me to risk any funds.
CPLX
If it makes you feel any better the money was never actually there in the first place.

If $11,000,000 turned into $700 then the "market cap" was bullshit and the coin was bullshit and whatever "price" it had was bullshit. Maybe you could have done a little better than you did but there wasn't any there there, in the sense that there were actually eleven million real greenback dollars in the hands of people that had any interest at all in owning that coin.

This dynamic completely underpins the entire concept of crypto, with the possible exception of a couple big ones. It's just market manipulation and people trading with each other. Turns out nobody wanted to own digital apes either it was grift all the way down.

endofreach
Ouch. I do hope you don‘t miss the millions. Still: 700 bucks could feed some people on this planet for at least one year, if not even two.

And another upside: the valuable lessons you learned are probably worth… well… millions of dollars!

Back to topic: How did the crash lead to losing the money technically? What happened here? How did too many requests of selling lead to „devaluation“?

You should definitely write a longer form story about this and include some code.

seabass-labrax
> How did too many requests of selling lead to „devaluation“?

This is not specific to cryptography, it's a feature of all markets: if there's a scarce resource that a lot of people want, people will pay more for it. Parent flooded the market with whatever cryptocurrency instruments they held, suddenly making them a lot less scarce and so reducing their value. They could have avoided losing that by selling much more slowly (as they intended) or refusing to sell below a certain fixed price. In either case, they would probably not get quite as much as they had hoped for the whole lot due to a lesser version of the same effect.

december456
I dont think reputable alt-coins with liquidity could turn into 11mil->700$ in an hour, so i consider it pretty safe to assume that 11 million wasnt actually 11 million: it doesnt matter if nobody wants it. Nevertheless, great work on processing such emotional burden.
ryanjshaw
It's a great story but what makes me question it is the idea that any altcoin exchange from 10yrs ago ran for more than a year without getting "hacked" and/or outright disappearing.
withinboredom
Where did you get 10 years from?
ryanjshaw
In another comment you said this was 3-4 years ago, and by that point apparently this had been running "several years", which one usually takes to mean 3 or more years, so in total 7-8+ years ago at least, which I rounded up to 10.

For what it's worth, I'm not accusing you of lying, I'm making a tongue in cheek observation about altcoin exchanges.

It does seem like you are stating the MTM valuation (i.e. spot x notional) without mentioning liquidity, which is where the confusion from others is coming in. It's very possible to accumulate a large position in a low liquidity altcoin that you will have zero hopes of selling for that valuation, even over time.

withinboredom
Ah, yeah, I can see that. I wrote the initial code in 2018ish, re-discovered it just before covid, IIRC.

> It does seem like you are stating the MTM valuation (i.e. spot x notional) without mentioning liquidity, which is where the confusion from others is coming in. It's very possible to accumulate a large position in a low liquidity altcoin that you will have zero hopes of selling for that valuation, even over time.

I'm not 100% what those words mean, but if I'm understanding you correctly, this 11 million was if I could sell it for in a perfect universe. It wasn't the actual price I could sell it for ... obviously, that was about $700.

ryanjshaw
> I'm not 100% what those words mean, but if I'm understanding you correctly, this 11 million was if I could sell it for in a perfect universe. It wasn't the actual price I could sell it for ... obviously, that was about $700.

That's right. So you may have accumulated 11m HN coins, but the market for them is dead except for 1 exchange where a pump n dumper is the only person offering to buy any. They are currently paying 1 USD for each of them, but they are only willing to buy up 700 HN coins at most. MTM is 11 million USD but liquidity is only 700 USD.

So your story is perfectly possible, but without stating liquidity it's unclear which number you meant when you said $11m unless people are familiar with the markets in which case it's obvious you meant MTM. Most people would expect min(MTM, liquidity over reasonable time frame), though.

tornato7
Sounds like your bot hit some edge case and was min-maxing on long tail shitcoins with no liquidity on Uniswap. You maybe could have done a bit better than $700 via TWAP but likely not much more than $10k or so. It's just not that possible to turn $100 into $11M via arbitrage.
withinboredom
It was literally only working due to an improper implementation of standard deviations, IIRC. When I fixed the implementation, it didn't make any money, so I kept the bug. I've used this 'buggy' implementation on a couple of other projects as well, because it does a fantastic job -- a "secret sauce" of sorts.
VierScar
Can you explain what it did? Or why an improper standard deviation would change the profitability of your bot?
withinboredom
The algorithm was pretty simple, but required access to all standing orders. It would look for resistance building/degrading and capitalize on it, making a bet that it would or wouldn't fully form/degrade based on how fast it was doing so. To do that, it needed to know if new orders were just part of the current resistance or potentially part of a new resistance. The standard deviation helped inform that decision since pretty much anything within a standard deviation of the edge is probably part of the same resistance.

It also monitored the buy/sell gap, and took some notes from that (large gaps mean new resistances while a small gap means waiting for a big order to break through and cause volatility).

friend_and_foe
Wait... I'm very much academically interested in the math you did. Particularly, how a standard deviation calculation being wrong can give you an edge. Do you understand the bug enough to know how it changed things and why it worked? I'm not asking you what the edge is, it's just that from my understanding of how these things work something like that shouldn't be possible.
FreakLegion
Take what he's saying with a grain of salt. This post activated my spidey sense from another thread a year back, about SHA hashes being poorly distributed compared to MD5, and sure enough, it's the same dude.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32409168

withinboredom
Yes, and at the risk of this sounding like a personal attack, why even bring this up? Did you read the thread you linked to?

> soooo basically there is no bias

> Looks like it. Though I think md5 is faster, which is maybe what I’m remembering, now that I think about it. This was years ago, funny how memory gets tainted.

FreakLegion
I brought it up because without remembering the name from that exchange a year ago, the similarly casual misunderstanding-proffered-as-fact in the post here led me to guess it would be the same person, and it was. Which is just to say that I suspect you have the details wrong in this case, too. That's all.
withinboredom
Fair enough, I guess. People got hung up on the details of the bot and big numbers, which in retrospect, is to be expected here. I was just trying to point out that you stand to lose a shit ton of money when doing a side-project that touches money. Bugs can really bite you in the ass in a very tangible way. The bot details are interesting, I'm not hiding anything there -- at first I was a bit cagey with the algorithm, but that was mostly because I couldn't even remember what branch in what repo it was hiding in. Then I found it, and was able to read the code.
withinboredom
Looking at the code, the purpose was to locate the nearest resistance by analyzing current orders in the market, and the slope of the orders around each resistance point, over time. This was used as one signal on whether or buy/sell. Std Deviation was calculated with this code:

    public static decimal StdDeviation(IEnumerable<decimal> data, decimal mean)
    {
         var sumOfSquares = data.Select(x => (x - mean) * (x - mean)).Sum();
         return (decimal) Math.Sqrt((double) sumOfSquares / (data.Count() - 1));
    }
It was written at 1:30am, according to git blame ... there's even a potential division by 0 hiding in there, so this is some shit code 'just to see what happens'. Anyway, that `data.Count() - 1` is the part that is "wrong" and tbh, I have no idea how it changes things.

The mean passed to it wasn't even a true mean either, it was a sliding window mean, of a specific area of resistance multiplied by reciprocal of an "influence" coefficient. Yeah... I have no idea how this shit worked. This is nearly 5 years old at this point and hasn't run in 3+ years.

It used to output a realtime graph that was visible from the web, it would show the output of all this math. From what I remember, this signal shows as a line on the buy side, sloping up/down. That slope indicated whether a specific resistance line was at risk of dissolving or a new one being created with the idea being to buy as much as possible before the resistance line actually dissolved.

i-use-nixos-btw
I’m not sure what I’m finding harder to believe here. That one could lose more than 99.99% due to a timing fat finger (even on a quiet market - 11m over 30 minutes eating through the order book?), or that an arb bot that you forgot about managed to run for that long on a server without hitting endpoint changes, API changes, re-auth requests, etc.
ifdefdebug
Yeah this is a made-up story so obvious for anyone who spent any time whatsoever programming against those exchanges... Please don't upvote just to keep your replies on the top...
withinboredom
I highly doubt we are/were on the same exchanges. The algorithm only worked on volatile coins with low-mid market volume. It wouldn't work on high market volume or stable coins.
i-use-nixos-btw
In order to eat through over 99.99% of the price, this isn’t a low-mid market volume. It’s non-existent market volume.

I’ve worked on everything from the ultra liquid equity futures markets down to the shittiest of shitcoins imaginable and these numbers just don’t make sense at all. There’s a paradox: your valuation implies an active market and your execution implies a dead market.

When shitcoin markets die, they die at small fractions of a cent, and there are lingering sell orders in from people who got caught in the pump’n’dump and live under the false hope that their superconductorcoin will be worth something later on, which then removes the possibility of any remaining large-price buy orders. So for your valuation to be that high, it can’t have been a dead market.

But for your execution to be that low, it has to have been one.

I can’t truly believe that someone who is smart enough to build a system that accidentally stays functioning in the background for that long (I’ve never seen such a thing) is silly enough to calculate valuations so naively.

withinboredom
Not dead markets, but not very active ones by the time the death of this project occurred. I'd have to review the code to see how it calculated a 'cash out' value, exactly, but IIRC, it basically just took the highest bid to convert to bitcoin/eth or whatever and summed up everything. It was entirely naive af, for sure. Probably because I assumed that my future self wouldn't essentially sell off everything in 30 minutes.

Also, I still know of at least two projects that I wrote, running since 2012 with very little maintenance ... knowing how to write resilient software and being clairvoyant aren't mutually exclusive.

spencerchubb
Just run the arbitrage bot again. Or better yet, if you can prove to me that this was true I'd be willing to buy your arbitrage bot for $10k. Serious offer
withinboredom
I don't think the APIs I was using still exist (this was ~3-4 years ago), so I suspect that it just won't work any more.
qup
The guy can pay me $5k and I'll hook it up to new APIs. Semi-serious offer.
withinboredom
Contact information is in my profile. The bot is actually MIT licensed and available on GH, it's just tucked away on a random branch in a totally unrelated repo.
quickthrower2
Language designers not having meaningful number type aliases (e.g. NanoSeconds instead of int) is a, well ... $11m mistake.
yieldcrv
lol you had $700 in liquidity because the team found your dumb bot and saddled you with their illiquid asset for your liquid eth

its one of the easiest trades

mellosouls
Great job! How do you find your new identity as a coder - enjoying it enough to pursue as a main line or sticking with the trading and other skills you used here?
buckwhitzer
Thank you! I'm pretty comfy spending most of my time coding the website and adding/planning new tools as well as its promotion, but I still trade occasionally and I also have some passive income selling photos on stocks (I don't upload anymore, it keeps on selling old photos).

But yes I really enjoy coding and may even take some freelance projects when the website requires less work.

TacticalCoder
Really cool.

Are all the data feeds you are using free?

buckwhitzer
Thanks, man! Yes, all APIs are free. Also, it's hosted on Vercel so it's free too because their free tier is really generous. The only thing I pay for is the domain name.
tornato7
That's one thing you really have to love about crypto. Getting the equivalent data from a stock exchange would cost you $$$ and come with all sorts of license agreements and restrictions on republishing the data.
buckwhitzer
Exactly. I still couldn't find free APIs for such a simple thing like realt-time S&P500 and NASDAQ indexes.
gumballindie
No questions - just here to congratulate you! This looks amazing and it’s amazing you learned AND built all this in one year. I love reading about such stories and more people should dare share them!
buckwhitzer
Thank you so much!
jen729w
And I'll jump in here rather than at the top and say, wow, this thing loads fast. I haven't clicked anything yet but the first load is _startlingly_ quick. What's the trick, and is that intentional?
buckwhitzer
It's powered by Next.js' SSR (Server Side Rendering) so it's all prerendered on the server side. Also, I like compressing the images. Thanks for commenting!
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franky47
Great job! A couple of pointers for UX improvement:

- Animations look nice, but don't abuse them. Eg: on the Exchanges page, animating the tab switches between Spot & Futures makes it difficult to focus on the actual values.

- Your "share" feature could use a way to restore table filters/sorts based on the URL query. I have recently released a library that helps with that in Next.js: https://github.com/47ng/next-usequerystate

buckwhitzer
Thanks so much!

1. Yeah, I was thinking they may be too much sometimes. What would you recommend for switching animation? Simply fading?

2. That's a nice library, already starred it. How does it work with SEO? Won't Google complain that they are non-indexed pages?

franky47
1. For two views that have a similar layout/content, no animation at all. If you want to preserve the relationship between the views, that is.

2. If you have a good sitemap with canonical URLs, it should not be a problem. Google will indeed report non-indexed pages, but chances are you don't want those indexed in the first place (et: there's no point indexing sorting options for a table).

CitrusFruits
Great job! Shipping an actual product is a huge milestone! Although I'm not that into crypto trading myself, I can see that a lot of work went into this.

I spend most of my professional time as a front end dev and am a UX enthusiast, so I thought I'd some feedback regarding the UX.

1. I'd work on establishing some strong patterns on what is clickable, what's an input, and what is information. If you look at /positionSize, you'll see what I'm talking about. "Loss" and "Stop Loss" both use identical design language, but one is an input, and the other is just information. You have a similar problem when looking at "Risk" vs "?". One appear to be a label, while one appears to be a toggle.

2. I'd consider using a different font. Hyper-stylized fonts like the one you have are super fun and can be a great way to express a brand identity, but it can come at the cost or readability and can even undermine a user's willingness to trust the security and reliability of the platform. I'd challenge you to spend an hour tuning it to something a little more mainstream like Roboto, Open Sans, or Ubuntu just to know what it would look like (you could even leave the existing font on the headers if you like).

3. Keep the minimum font size above 10px or 11px. You have some right now that is 8.4px and that's going to be impossible (quite literally) for some people to read without the use of magnification.

Once again, good job and cheers!

buckwhitzer
Thank you!

1. You're right, it's kind of confusing. Will fix all input cursors in this month's update. 2. I may make some changes in the overall website look in the big upcoming update although I quite like the font I'm using. Is it difficult to read for you? 3. I don't use font sizes smaller than 12px for important data and less than 10px for some less-important-data (like BETA and NEW badges in the side menu, which are semibold to make them more visible). The only place where 8.4px is used is for the 24H price change percentage for BTC and ETH prices in the header.

tornato7
Looks nice. You should definitely add Grayscale trust discounts!
buckwhitzer
Thank you! Will definitely look into it.
foxes
I learned to code and made the world slightly worse!
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jasfi
The UI looks incredible! Well done, this is a great idea executed nicely.

Are you the only one building this?

buckwhitzer
Thanks a lot! Yes, I did all by myself including idea, design, texts, coding, SEO, and now promotion/SMM.
KomoD
id get rid of the animations
buckwhitzer
Which ones exactly you find distracting/invasive? There are fade animations when you enter/exit pages and also sliding animations in some tools.
KomoD
> There are fade animations when you enter/exit pages

this the most, and switching under "Exchanges" same with "BTC/ETH Returns"

buckwhitzer
So basically all of them. Noted, thanks. If anyone else who's reading this believes that the animations are invasive, please leave a comment here or upvote this comment.