Econobot

Inspiration

As cryptocurrency continues to become more and more important in the finance sector, we believe that it will become a major player in the future. So, we wanted to incorporate this growing technology into our project

What it does

Econobot is a Discord bot that allows users to quickly access up-to-date and reliable statistics about their favorite cryptocurrencies. It takes in a cryptocurrency trading pair and returns statistics about it such as the current market price and market depth. The market depth is a good indicator of where the market price is headed in the near future, and is a good measure of overall supply and demand. Another command returns a graph of the data of the market depth.

How we built it

Econobot uses the Kraken REST API to take data from reputable cryptocurrency databases. Since our project uses python, we are accessing the Kraken API through the krakenex python wrapper. The data taken from the API is processed and then returned to the user through the py-cord API, which allows us to present the data in the form of a Discord Bot. The bot is hosted on Heroku, allowing it to always be online.

Challenges we ran into

Finding a suitable cryptocurrency API was difficult, as many of them are incomplete and do not have the information that we need. Hosting the bot on Heroku was also a challenge, as it took a few tries to meet all the requirements. Since we couldn’t find a definitive list of all the tradable pairs supported by the Kraken API, we had to come up with our own program to check the validity of an entered pair, which makes use of error handling

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Despite having little prior experience with APIs, we were able to make a functioning Discord Bot that smoothly incorporates the API to get data.

What we learned

We learned how to integrate APIs into our code, which was new for all of us. We also learned how to host our bot on Heroku. Finally, we also learned how to better leverage git’s resources to create an efficient workflow.