Splash Screen
Market View - Desktop
Stonk View - Desktop
Portfolio - Desktop
Leaderboard - Desktop
Stonk View - Mobile
Buy Stonk View - Mobile
Market View - Mobile
Portfolio - Mobile
Leaderboard - Mobile
Admin Panel - Mobile

Stonks – The One and Only Stonks Market of Reddit

Stonks is a highly adaptable, community-driven web application built for any subreddit to adopt and customize. Whether it's F1, Anime, Football Clubs, or simply Trending Memes, Stonks allows moderators to turn ongoing discussions into engaging, competitive trading events.

🏆 About The Project

💡 Inspiration

Our inspiration comes from Reddit events like r/place and r/field. These projects captured the essence of Reddit—collaborative, chaotic, and deeply engaging. We loved the optimizations used in r/field, but we noticed that many Devvit games are too niche or specific to a single subreddit.

We wanted to build something robust, configurable, and universally adaptable. A financial engine that empowers communities to engage with current trends in real-time. If there's a World Cup, a political debate, or a viral meme war, Stonks lets you trade on the outcome.

🎮 Features & Why We Built Them

We didn't just want a "game"; we wanted a platform that feels alive.

📱 The Stonks Experience

We didn't just want a "game"; we aimed for a complete, immersive trading ecosystem. Here is how a user experiences Stonks:

1. Discovery & Analysis 📈

When a user first joins, they are granted $10,000 in starting capital to begin their trading journey. The journey starts on the Market Dashboard, where users can browse all listed stocks with real-time price updates.

Stonks Charts: Clicking a stock opens the Detail View, featuring 5-Tier Timeframe Charts (30 mins, 3 hours, 30 hour, 7.5 days, All-time).

2. The Trading Floor 💸

Once a user spots an opportunity, they can Buy or Sell instantly.

Supply & Demand: Prices are not random. They are determined by a Virtual Automated Market Maker (AMM). Every Buy pushes the price up; every Sell pushes it down.
Our Frequent Batch Auction system aggregates all trades in 5-second windows, so as to not overburden the architecture with too frequent market updates.

3. Portfolio Management 💼

Users can track their empire in the Portfolio View.

Real-Time P/L: Watch your Net Worth grow (or shrink) live as the market moves.
Holdings: See exactly how much skin you have in the game for each stock, with average buy price and current return on investment.

4. Community Engagement 💬

Trading is social. Stonks includes Stock-Specific Live Chat rooms.

Live Chat: Users can shill their bags, panic sell together, or coordinate "moon missions" without leaving the app.
Leaderboards: A global ranking system tracks the top traders, adding a competitive layer that fuels engagement and keeps users coming back.

🛡️ Moderator Powers

We give community moderators full control to manage the market economy:

Create & Delete Stocks: Mods can list new stocks dynamically (e.g., adding a new "Meme of the Week") or delist old ones.
Event Scheduling: Start, Pause, or Schedule trading events with a timer. Run a 24-hour "Blitz" or a week-long "Season".
Game Reset: reset the old data for a new event.

🛠️ The Tech: Under The Hood

We are a team of two software engineers who started this project as a passion hack during weekends. Over the course of 3 weeks, we built a robust, high-performance application from scratch.

🏗️ Architecture & Optimization

Building a high-frequency trading platform on a serverless architecture like Devvit was a massive engineering challenge. Here is how we solved it:

1. The 5-Second "Tick" & Batching

Devvit functions are ephemeral. We couldn't run a continuous matching engine.

Solution: We implemented a Frequent Batch Auction model.
How it works: We accumulate all Buy/Sell orders into a Redis Hash during a 5-second window. At the end of the tick, a scheduled job resolves the entire batch in O(1) time using a bonding curve formula. This separates the "Intent" (User clicking buy) from the "Execution" (Price update), allowing us to handle massive concurrency.

2. Custom Virtual AMM (Automated Market Maker)

We heavily researched traditional Order Book models but found them too memory intensive for this environment.

Solution: We designed a unique, in-house Automated Market Maker specifically tailored for Devvit's constraints.
Innovation: Unlike a simple constant bonding curve, our model features a Dynamic Liquidity Scaling mechanism. The liquidity constant scales intelligently with price action.
Why: This prevents the "infinite price explosion" often seen in basic bonding curves, ensuring that stocks remain affordable and tradable even after massive rallies. It guarantees infinite liquidity—users can always trade—while maintaining a stable, sustainable economy.

3. Optimistic Updates & Realtime

Challenge: Users hate latency. Waiting 5 seconds for a price update feels sluggish.
Solution: We perform Optimistic UI Updates on the client (balance drops immediately) while the backend processes the trade. We then use Devvit's realtime API to broadcast the definitive global_ticker state to all connected clients, ensuring eventual consistency without polling.

🚧 Challenges We Ran Into

Our biggest challenge was optimizing for high concurrency. A live trading game on Reddit needs to handle thousands of users spamming "BUY" at once.

Throughput: We optimized the system to handle 60,000+ trades per minute or 3.6 million trades per hour.
Redis Limits: We hit the limits of Redis throughput. To solve this, we implemented Write Coalescing—instead of updating the database for every single trade, we aggregate volume in memory and flush to Redis in batches.
State Management: Syncing the "Portfolio" view across multiple devices while trades were happening in the background required a complex state-reconciliation logic.

🏅 Accomplishments That We're Proud Of

Performance: Successfully handling 60k+ trades/min in our playtests with zero downtime.
UI/UX: Achieving a buttery-smooth 60fps mobile experience with intuitive gestures that feels like a native app.
Adaptability: Creating a truly generic engine that fits any subreddit context without code changes.

Built with ❤️ and ☕.