NotAFinancialAdvisor

Inspiration

We undertook this challenge as it was one of the challenges set out by one of the sponsors of the event, Qube Research Technologies. However, we wanted to have some fun with this challenge and thought that a meme format would be an interesting way of highlighting trends as opposed to just regular graphs.

What it does

We have a simple website that gives a user visual information on the current real-time price of Bitcoin in USDT. This is done through the use of a candle chart and scatter-style plot. In addition, this information is coupled with a meme that signifies the recent trends in the graphs

How we built it

We had 3 separate focuses. These were the front-end design of the website where the data would be presented, the gathering of data through the Binance API itself and the graphical mapping of this data through Python.

We first identified how to create both a scatter-style graph as well as a candle chart using 'dummy' data to consolidate our usage of graphical mapping methods in Python (more specifically matplotlib).

Our next step was to identify how to use the Binance API to actually obtain the data. This originated with us first using a Google Chrome Extension to create GET requests for websocket endpoints. This allowed us to understand the API better and figure out what responses we would receive from our requests. We then were able to use the websockets library in python to obtain the live data and store this obtained data in a CSV file.

The final step was combining the visualisation algorithms and the data together on a simple website. Next, the live CSV data from earlier was fed to our graphical data map. We then saved our matplotlib chart as an image and constantly were able to update this image as new live data came along, adding a meme along the way depending on whether the value of the coin trended upwards, downwards or remained relatively stable.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge that we faced was the combination of work from all the members of our team. It was particularly difficult to transition from 'dummy' data to true live data as we ended up having various errors when trying to plot live-data for the first time.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The main thing we are proud of is having a completed project that is able to actually provide the real-time price of a cryptocurrency. We are also particularly proud of the fact that everyone in the team made a big contribution. This was despite some of our team not being veteran programmers nor veteran hackathon participants.

What we learned

How to collaborate as a team. Some of our team members had never used GitHub before, we learnt how to collaborate using push/pull requests and using commits to update the code. We also learnt how to use an API for the first time, in particular the Binance API and what data it provides for anyone that would like to use it. Hence, we can take the knowledge of the Binance API to now add additional cryptocurrencies to our graph.

What's next for NotAFinancialAdvisor

We would like to add the option to choose between multiple different cryptocurrencies (not just Bitcoin) and view the respective real-time data as such. Also, we would really like to add a more sophisticated meme evaluation model for the data, giving more diverse range of memes to evaluate the data and give the user the option to select how frequent the memes would appear. For example, the user could opt for an hourly or daily update through meme format on how a specific cryptocurrency was doing.