An Intelligent Crypto Trading Bot for Everyday Investors
By: Anthony Xie
Tags: Cryptocurrency, Investing, Bitcoin, Startup, Finance

18 Sep 2018

We launched HodlBot in early April 2018 with the goal of “democratizing investing for everyday people”.

Our MVP was a simple cryptocurrency index called the HODL20 that anyone could invest in. All you needed was a Binance account.

The HODL20 tracked the performance of the top 20 coins by market cap and made up of 87% of the entire cryptocurrency market cap.

*HODL20 allocation as of March 25, 2018. Each coin is capped at 10%. Excess is re-distributed to holdings less than 10%. The default rebalancing period was one month.*

It’s been 5 months since we’ve launched. We’ve shipped a ton of updates to our product and I’m excited to share with all of you what we’ve been cooking up.

Free for Everyone under $500

We can’t democratize investing for everyday people if our product is too expensive. So the first thing we decided to do was to make HodlBot free for all accounts under $500.

While our usual price of $10/month isn’t a lot, it was prohibitively high for smaller account sizes.

Every bit of revenue is going to help support the team, so we can continue to roll out new and improved features for our users. As we scale, we’ll make more and more of HodlBot free.

Expanding Beyond the HODL20 — Create your own Portfolio

While the majority of people see better returns by passively indexing the market, there are definitely some lucky/talented individuals out there who can outperform the market.

Now with HodlBot, you can create a portfolio with any of the 350+ coins listed on Binance. Simply select a coin and choose the percentage allocation you want. HodlBot will automatically rebalance your portfolio to your target allocation.

Create your own portfolio with HodlBot

Although it’s not always financially wise to speculate, the overall market benefits from opinionated traders. If everyone indexed the market, we would never see price differences between good & bad projects.

Historical Backtesting

It’s ill-advised to build & run a custom portfolio blind. We’ve collected a ton of data from Coinmarketcap and Binance, so you can simulate the performance of any custom portfolio over time. Benchmark your portfolio performance against BTC and see how well your strategy does over time.

Historical Performance of 33% ETH, 33% BTC, 33% ZEC vs. Bitcoin

Custom Rebalancing

When we originally launched the HODL20, the default rebalancing period was set to 28 days.

There’s been a lot of healthy debate surrounding what the best rebalancing period is. While we maintain there is no best rebalancing period, we wanted to give our users a greater range of choice. You can now set your rebalancing period anywhere between 1 and 1,000,000,000,000,000 days.

Index Blacklist

There are some cryptocurrency projects among the top 20 coins that investors want to avoid like the plague. When you blacklist a coin from the HODL20, Hodlbot skips it and adds the next highest coin by market cap.

Cash Out

There is no obligation to stay with HodlBot. You can liquidate your portfolio anytime you want. This is one of the main benefits of holding the underlying assets yourself.

You can covert up to 100% of your entire portfolio into any coin that is trade-able on Binance e.g. USDT, BTC, ETH.

Cryptocurrency Payments

When we first launched HodlBot, we only accepted payments through credit card.

Since all of our users have cryptocurrency, cryptocurrency payments was a natural fit. We want to do our part in promoting adoption and so we launched crypto payments.

For accounts over $500, we accept BTC, ETH, LTC, ETC, BCH. HodlBot is normally $10 a month, but only $8/month if you sign up for the whole year.

Future Roadmap

At HodlBot, we aim for short development cycles and pushing product updates weekly. The goal from here on out is to publish a product update every 2 weeks.

Here are a few of the things we’re working on right now.

New Indices

In the upcoming weeks, we’re planning to launch a plethora of new indices. We are big believers in passive investing and indexing, so we’ll continue to do research & development on that front.

Advanced portfolio customization options

Besides indices, we want our users to be able to create any kind of portfolio they can dream up. Expect more sophisticated portfolio customization options such as market cap weighting, caps, etc.

Superior Trade Execution

Bots are much more efficient at placing orders than humans. You may be able to place one trade at a time by hand, but instantly be able to place fifty with a bot.

On Binance, you can reduce your transaction fee by 50% when you pay with BNB. Soon HodlBot will automatically purchase tiny amounts of BNB before every trade in order to minimize fees.

Sign Up for HodlBot

If you would like to try out HodlBot, the first 14 days of HodlBot are free. HodlBot is also free for any account under $500.

To get started all you need is a

Binance Account $200 in any cryptocurrency

If you want to know how HodlBot indexes the market and completes rebalancing, check out the blog I wrote here.

Talking to our users is where we get most of our ideas. If you’re interested in what we’re working on, come join our Telegram group. It’s a tight-knit community of 600+ members.