London Startup Seeks to Unleash DIY Bitcoin Trading Bots on the Markets

Bitcoin trading bots will no longer be the exclusive preserve of software and finance wonks if startup Tradewave has its way.

The London-based company has developed a platform that lets users create their own trading bots, stripping away some of the complexities of programming such tools independently.

Tradewave's founder James Potter said his platform would address the "mismatch" between institutional traders with the resources to develop their own bots and retail investors who are left to execute trades by hand: "A lot of institutional trading is now automated and retail is very manual ... There's a wave of companies now that are democratising automated trading." Trades placed by software have seen explosive growth in the established financial markets.

High-frequency trading, which is conducted by algorithms, accounts for up to three-quarters of trading volume in US stock markets, according to the Bank of England. This has grown from less than 20% of trading volume in 2005. Democratising bot trading Tradewave lets users write trading strategies in Python, a programming language. The Python scripts are run off Tradewave's website, which means users don't have to set up a programming 'environment' to operate their bots, which can be a cumbersome process.

Users can pay $19.99 a month to connect their Tradewave bots to four exchanges: Bitstamp, BTC-e, Bitfinex and Kraken. The Tradewave bots can then buy and sell on those exchanges on the user's accounts. Potter said he has raised seed funding for Tradewave from a prominent angel investor in the cryptocurrency space, who he declined to identify for the record.

(And they are looking for programmers...:-)