DEXBot End of Year 1 Report Dec 2018
DEXBot End Of Year Report Dec 2019
Intro: Letter from the Cabinet
It has been an exciting year for DEXBot. We started with chatting about ideas, put together a proposal, created a market making trading bot and launched several strategies. From nothing, we have an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) up, working and under budget.
There were many highs and lows along the way; people who have never met came together and decided on a plan. Executed it successfully and did so even with a delayed start. After putting the worker proposal out to the community it took a plunge in the BTS price before votes passed the proposal. Here was something we could do to help address liquidity as a community.
An instant high followed that low; this is going to happen!
Then the work started. Marko put together the team that started to formulate code - Codaone.
There were many questions, ideas and strategies. We got the beta version launched, and then came the long line of bug fixes.
There were lows along the way. At times the worker proposal was temporarily defunded, causing a minor panic (luckily Cabinet managed the project with multiple week’s expenses!).
There was the time when one of the new strategies backfired and did not work as intended. Yep, Marko lost not an insignificant amount of his own money. These are the dangers and perils of working on software that deals with real money. That is why each strategy is thoroughly tested before release.
It is so easy to say, “We did it,” and forget all the perils along the journey. We needed to keep peace and work together. We needed to compromise. We needed to decide on what language to use what software to use and what programers to use. We needed to avoid bad partnerships, and form good ones. We needed to tell some people who eagerly wanted to contribute “no” -because their help was hurting at the time.
We needed to prioritize decisions and create strategies that added liquidity to the market and did not remove it. Building a communal trading bot, that everyone can use, and uses strategies that helps the market and does not hinder is not as easy as some may think. From a technical side, there were countless hours of writing code, making sure strategies work as intended and trying to hunt down why someone somewhere was getting an error code.
There was keeping peace and the conversation on topic in Telegram Chatrooms. There was explaining strategies and markets to new traders. There was making money and losing money while trading. But through all of this, we brought forth DEXbot, a market making bot that allows ordinary traders and investors to make markets in a helpful and beneficial way adding liquidity to the BitShares blockchain.
Along the way some exciting things happened. The Dexbot Cabinet came together as a real team to support Marko who did the heavy work managing the project. Because of DEXBot Cryptick proposed an Android Custom Wallet Proposal to the community. While that worker did not pass, now there is now whole host of interesting mobile proposals fulfilling the vision. DEXBot is one of the few remaining independent workers outside of the BBF foundation. This is beneficial for all, as it allows DEXBot complete independence to promote fair trading and helps to fully realize the decentralized vision of blockchain projects.
The DEXbot is not and does not need to be the most visible project on BitShares. We don’t need everyone involved, but want their vote of support. Ultimately, most people benefit from DEXBot and do not even realize it.
When trading, people take the narrower spreads for granted. DEXBot works day and night, helping money move back and forth through the BitShares Ecosystem. This is done by the ever expanding group of individual traders independently choosing to run DEXBot and other liquidity providing software at their own risk. This software increases the number of transactions, increases transaction fees and moves a great deal of CryptoBridge, OpenLedger, GDEX, RUDEX assets, while paying commissions. Everyone benefits.
It has been a great start, but there is still more to do. We have a working product, but there is more that we can add. Much of the year was spent building functatility, now we need more efforts towards customer support, user guides, documentation and adding new strategies. Marko has been leading this project part time, but Permie is now ready to step in take over project management. He feels this is the great tool that can be utilized by strategic partners to make trading better on the Dex. We realize markets are not yet as liquid as everyone would like, and we feel more strategies can help facilitate this. Cross exchange arbitrage could help BTS prices stay in line with other markets and enable customers to get better fills.
We feel the full potential of the DEXbot project is just starting, and to abandon it now would be like throwing a young child out onto the streets before he is grown up. While we are working on a backup minimum maintenance plan, we are asking for continued community support. We understand, that Crypto markets have taken a dive and are very aware of what is going on in the markets, like the recent global bitUSD settlement. That said, as one worker comes to a conclusion, we are putting forth another in order to take this project forward. We know that good projects development takes time, and what we build now, will be there in the future to help keep Bitshares in a leading position among the Decentralised Exchanges. -Crytpick1 (Cabinet Member)
TOTAL SPENT: $146,284.30
Expenses -Breakdown by Category
Development: $98,917.30
Expenses: $412
Exposure/PR: $5,010
Management: $22,095
Cabinet WP Management: $2,250
UX (User Experience): $6,640
Expenses - Breakdown by Recipient
A)Codaone Total Expense=$120,660
Of which:
Build Maintainer: $24,132
Milestone 1: 9.8% of total expense, $11,790
Milestone 2: 4.9% of expense, $5,880
Milestone 3: 5% of expense, $6,020
Cumulative Development until V0.8.0:
B) Independent Dev Projects: $10,902.30
Octomatic: $4,080
Vvk: $5,622.30
Litepresence: $1,000
SamTheCoinMan: $200
C) Cabinet members: $14,722, 5.8% of budgeted $250k
Project management: $6,370
Development: $960
Website: $3,362
PR: $1,740
WP Management: $2,250
Every time bts was sold for bitUSD, we did so by placing limit orders at least 5% above the market price. The Cabinet never dumped on the market. Always making orders, never taking.
To achieve this we always made sure we had ~ one months expenses in bitUSD ahead of time so that we could afford to wait for our bts sell orders to execute.
We made sure we never had to rush, and achieved a better price per bts as a result. The budget was never exceeded.
Goal of Year 1:
to build a functional market making bot for under $250k
Succeeded
Assets accumulated after year 1:
Excellent community of knowledgeable devs, testers and users
High-value Target-Audience members who follow DEXBot on twitter.
A 750 strong community of market makers discussing ways best to profit from trading on the DEX.
The Cabinet used the business management tools of Bitshares to efficiently manage a global project in a secure and decentralised way. Multisignature approval has been used for every financial action. Decision making has benefited massively from 6 way conferences with diverse opinions on how to both achieve results and serve Bitshares.
Year 1 focussed on building the groundwork using an established Development House; Codaone.
Building a Minimum Viable Product was best achieved through utilising the skill set of a well organised existing team.
Trying to use a decentralised “team” made up of individuals who aren't located in the same office to build up from nothing would have been slower progress and would have resulted in a product that would be less-clean and harder for later newcomers to the project to absorb what has already been written and harder for them to see where they can add value.
In future The Cabinet believe DEXBot will be best served by a bounty system. With individuals all over the world developing relatively small additions to be compiled into the DEXBot code incrementally in monthly releases.
The Cabinet team did not pay themselves market rate for their contributions to the project and instead chose to do everything possible to prove that we can achieve results.
We are believers in Bitshares and we wanted to help.
Now that we have established ourselves as reliable servants of Bitshares we intend to continue our hard work but bring our hourly compensation for project-contributions in line with market rate. The Cabinet have a combined 12+ years of experience in the Bitshares community and our management is valuable.
It was important that development is done by a person or a company that has an existing reputation on line and is not anonymous or pseudonymous. That would ensure trustworthiness, which is important for a program that holds your private keys. Codaone has dozens of business customers. Cabinet are satisfied with the work provided by Codaone and trust that their reputation in business outside and before Bitshares serves as excellent collateral against fraud or theft from Bitshares’ users.
Most of the effort appears to have been on the cross-platform and cli/ui aspect. Every function works on every platform. It would have been significantly faster, likely an order of magnitude, to make a cli-only program.
Since we didn’t have an experienced lead developer, we had some challenges in making the culture comfortable and inviting for freelancers. Luckily we were found by some awesome contributors, who were flexible and patient enough to let us adjust our procedures for better collaboration. Time zone differences also presented a challenge.
We, the Cabinet, who controlled the money, aren’t developers. That caused some challenges. It wasn’t obvious to us what requirements to present to the developers. We had to find a balance between getting stuff done quick or done right. The developers insisted on doing things properly, which made development take time. Sometimes the urge to say “this should have been ready a month ago” was very strong. Apparently even developers tend to underestimate the time a project takes, let alone non-developers. In the end we have a code base that’s well structured, which means it is good to maintain and to expand, and possible to get acquainted with.
The Cabinet have managed a successful project with much more room to grow and flourish if and when more WP funding is received.