BOGGED.me - Paper Trading platform for Cryptocurrency

People want to try cryptocurrency trading but realize the financial risks involved. We provide a "paper trading" platform for people to try out trading strategies with no real capital involved.

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Quick rundown

I've been in the cryptocurrency scene for a few years now and have had a lot of fun learning about different coins and trading methods. I've tried to get my friends and family into trading as I think that it can be both fun and profitable if you learn how to read the trends and find a good portfolio that you can have confidence in. The problem is that, right now as Bitcoin and certain other cryptos are at an all time high, people still shy away from trading as it can be rather intimidating to invest your real life, hard-earned cash into something as hand-wavy as a piece of code. That's why I think creating a cryptocurrency trading web platform that doesn't use real money has a lot of value. People can get started, or if they're already experienced, try to hone their skills (e.g. swing trading, day trading) without risking real capital. There's also a leaderboard to track who is most successful with their trades, and hopefully this will lead to user collaboration and interaction in the future.

How we built it

We built the backend with Flask Python due to it being very lightweight and easy to work with. Most of the code is HTML/CSS and some JS scripts. I ended up using a program called Bootstrap Studio, a drag and drop webpage builder, to create the webpages using Bootstrap to make it responsive and nice to look at. We are still in the workings of having a functional database, right now our database doesn't support anything beyond a local instance. I had to use a few APIs such as CoinGecko's and Coinlib.io's. We mainly worked together as a two person team on Discord for the 2 weeks, and did our Kanban using Trello. It was a good experience to learn how to do a small scale project with a very small team.

Challenges we ran into

Working around our schedules was not easy. I went on a short vacation during the first week of the hackathon, though I did get to do work on my laptop, we were both pressed for time. Also, it was both of our's first foray into using Flask and doing full stack web development. We certainly spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to do some very "simple" tasks. Managing what was most important and predicting how much time it would take to complete a task was a big roadblock as well. By now we're both more realistic about time when it comes to software development.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Turning in our project We are proud of what we have submitted. Though it's not able to be launched right now, we were able to get:

  • A home page using Bootstrap
  • A login and register system with a user database
  • A leaderboard system that pulls in all user's profits and ranks them by % increase (or decrease)
  • A trading dashboard that allows users to check what the price of a coin is, execute the purchase of a coin, and execute the sale of the coin
  • Keeping a user data record including their wallet, cash balance, email, etc.
  • Upgrading a very rudimentary series of HTML pages to a responsive, nice-looking Bootstrap one
  • Pushing our project to Heroku (currently under construction w/ bugs)
  • Finishing my first hackathon ever!

What we learned

The basics of Flask, routing, hosting with Heroku. Also how to work together on a small team and how to distribute work in an Agile fashion.

What's next for BOGGED.me - Paper Trading platform for Cryptocurrency

We're going to keep working on it. Ideally I want to have it up and running as a real service with actual users. This might take a while since we're both going to be very busy with work, internships, and school. Hopefully it will be in a usable state on Bogged.me in the near future!

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