Hummingbot connector governance

by Michael Feng

At Hummingbot, our mission is to make algorithmic trading accessible to anyone in the world. That’s why we built an open source framework that allows anyone to run trading bots on any exchange. This prevents both individual traders and funds from having to build and maintain low-level exchanges integrations from scratch, so that they can focus on more enjoyable aspects of algo trading: building good trading strategies and profiting from them!

From the beginning, we’ve always thought of Hummingbot as a shared public framework to which everyone can contribute by creating connectors for the exchanges where they want to trade. Since there are thousands of exchanges with different architectures and products (and even more added every day), a community-led model is the only way that Hummingbot can truly scale and serve the long tail.

Today, Hummingbot supports 11 official exchanges, but we are also aware of a number of community-built forks for exchanges such as Loopring, Bitpanda, and Beaxy. We’re incredibly grateful for these contributions.

In order to ensure a high level of quality and consistency for the Hummingbot codebase, we painstakingly review all of our connectors before every release. Since exchange APIs often change and we are continually adding features to Hummingbot, this review process is essential to maintaining a good experience for Hummingbot users. Most importantly, we have to ensure that new connectors do not introduce usability or security issues for general users of the open source codebase.

In order to enable Hummingbot forks to be merged into the main codebase while maintaining a high level of quality, we will let the community vote for the next exchange connector that we integrate into Hummingbot. This is an initial, experimental step toward making Hummingbot a community-owned and operated open source framework.

Governance process overview

• During each release, community members will be able vote for the next exchange connector to be integrated into Hummingbot
• The first vote will take place from Monday August 24 to Monday September 10, the date when we plan to release v0.31.0.
• Afterwards, for the connector that receives the most votes, our team will work with the developer to review and merge in the connector into the open source codebase during the subsequent release
• This process will repeat during every release, so that at least one connector is approved and reviewed every few weeks.

How to participate

• The first few rounds of voting will be conducted in the #governance channel on our. All members of the Hummingbot community are eligible to participate.
• On August 24, we will publish a list of eligible connectors and the poll to the #governance channel, and community members can vote
• We will host dedicated forums to debate and discuss connector governance on Discord and Reddit.
• If the initial experimental phase goes well, we will build a Governance tab into the Hummingbot Miner app and migrate the voting process there.

For connector developers

• All functional connectors that meet the exchange connector requirements are eligible for consideration.
• Developers who wish to submit a connector for consideration in the first round of voting should email a Github repository link to dev[at]hummingbot.io by Wednesday August 19.
• Note that we will make the connector available to the community for testing during the voting process, so build quality may be an important factor in driving votes.

This is an important first step in letting the community to decide how the Hummingbot codebase evolves. In the future, we’ll announce even more ways that you can get involved!