Grzegorz Korycki is a software developer with a niche skill set that has seen increasing demand over the last few years, and with very good reason – he can design and program cryptocurrency trading bots to do his bidding.
Korycki founded Tradecraft, a site where users can rent the services of his bot which has already earned over 50 BTC for clients in under two years through smart trading.
He spoke with CryptoIsComing and told us a little more about himself, his work, and the nature of his trading bot.
What is your professional background?
I was a hobbyist programmer since I was 7 years old. I started to do it professionally 5 years ago when I was 30 years old. Before I created any bots, I was working for free for over half a year with a forex trader – he had some ideas about bots and I helped create him one. After that, I created my first commercial bot, called “Grid Harvester” for the Forex market
What led you to decide to create a trading bot?
I realized the unsustainability of the debt-based fiat currency model and the hidden inflation it is subjecting us all to – it was then that I decided to explore trading. When I stumbled on crypto in 2013 it seemed like a perfect solution for the problems our system has.
By 2016 I still hadn’t created my first bot for crypto – I needed to gain some experience. I tried reaching some higher-profile crypto traders in 2014 in the hopes of working together on such a bot, but this didn’t work out. The truth is for every bot idea that works there are 50 different bot ideas that don’t work.
Before I created bots that were successful I tested many different unsuccessful bots. Ideas for the crypto bot were taken from my other bot for forex market. Creating bots for cryptos is easier in a sense than for the forex market, as in Forex you compete with algorithmic trading from the banks that pay hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars for their algorithms and have ultra-fast servers. It is hard to compete there.
On the other hand, the infrastructure is much weaker in crypto world – we don’t have any trading platform that could be compared with for example MetaTrader, that was designed for the forex market.
What can you tell us about the bot?
The bot trades bitcoin vs altcoin pairs and focuses on the aspects on trading that manual traders can’t execute. It’s more of a scavenger, because profits from a single transaction are usually very small and the mathematics leading to executing them are complex – therefore they are not attractive for manual traders – the risk/reward ratio doesn’t apply. That fact greatly diminishes the competition that could impact potential profitability.
Who would benefit from the use of your bot, and to whom is it commercially available?
So far it made about 50 BTC for its’ clients during 1,5 year period. Normally the bot is only available to members of one of the trading groups. New clients are only obtained by referral system of existing customers.
As a promotion, we made 10 slots exclusively available for users of cryptoiscoming.com.
Please send your email to thepaw@tradecraft.pl writing “cryptoiscoming” in the topic with a resume, the amount of bitcoin you want to invest, describing your experience in cryptocurrencies, when did you first started trading them and other proof that you are an experienced traders.
Not all applications will be accepted, but if there are more good applicants than free slots you will be added to a waitlist. Applications will be accepted until 01.11.2018. Be aware that we are during a bear trend now, so the profits may not be impressive or we may even have some losses, depending on settings.
How much of the crypto market’s trading volume do you think is comprised of bot trading? Is there a way to measure this?
I haven’t thought about that much – as with every market, the older and more sophisticated the markets get, the more trading volume is executed by the bots. Now every single exchange has an API, which makes creating bots much easier and drives trading volumes higher.
What effect does mass bot trading have on the market? Are all of the bots active on the market effective at earning profits?
They add liquidity to the markets and make the books thicker. They can participate in pump and dump schemes, they help in the process called price arbitrage, which makes the same symbols on different exchanges to have similar prices.
There are profitable and unprofitable ones. I bet more of them are profitable, when we are in bull trend, because new money is arriving to the market, than in bear trend when money is leaving. If I had to guess I’d think that the bots’ profitability in the long term follows some form of Pareto distribution.
I have heard that some trading bots are now operating out of their owner’s control, is that possible?
Never heard of that theory, but it is certainly possible. Bot can get out of control due to bad programming, random events or hacks. Sometimes bugs are lurking in the shadows to hit at the least expected moment. This is why it is a good idea to build a strategy back-testing environment to minimize the risk, but it’s impossible to avoid everything.
Over a week ago Bittrex changed how they accept API calls without explanation or warning – the bot was unable to execute any commands and it took a week to sort it out. We may enter the era of out-of-control trading bots, when they will be running as smart contracts, as there is much less room for error in that kind of environment.
What are your plans for the future of the bot? Do you plan other projects?
Now I am working on A history back-tester – next step is to make it available to users of the bot, so they can see how available pre-sets are performing in the past.
I have few projects waiting in line, but I still haven’t decided, which I will go with. One of it is an environment to create your own trading bots with the possibility of testing those bots on historical data.
I have few other projects in store, but I’d prefer not to disclose the details, due to the nature of the business. What I can say is that all my future project plans are connected to crypto-currencies in genres like trading, programming and gaming.
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