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Announcing the Vega Protocol Connector and Sponsorship

With the release of a new connector guide for the Vega DEX connector, we are thrilled to officially welcome Vega Protocol as a sponsor and partner of Hummingbot Foundation!

As an open source foundation dedicated to democratizing algo trading, Hummingbot Foundation seeks to align with like-minded organizations. We've known the Vega founding team since 2019 (an eternity in crypto!) and share their commitment to decentralized, permissionless trading. Built on a Layer 1 blockchain designed for derivatives trading, Vega Protocol stands out with its permissionless market creation feature, which enables any participant to launch a new market (trading pair) through governance.

That's why we're excited to warmly introduce Vega as a new Hummingbot Foundation sponsor, which will support our efforts to maintain the Vega integration to Hummingbot and educate our respective communities on how to use it!

Improvements to the Discord Support Program

Fourteen months have passed since the introduction of the Discord Support Program, an initiative designed to foster active involvement and collaborative problem-solving within the Hummingbot Discord community channels. This program has enabled the Foundation team to engage community developers and users in mutual support, freeing up our resources to focus on areas such as enhancing documentation, creating user guides, and improving the Hummingbot codebase.

But with the introduction of new Hummingbot features like Dashboard and V2 Strategies, newer members of our community have struggling to keep pace with troubleshooting and issue resolution. In response, the Foundation team has intensified its engagement with community members on Discord by answering questions. Moreover, we are committed to keeping our community members abreast of the newest Hummingbot developments on the roadmap, including the imminent launch of the Condor Telegram bot, custom screeners, and advanced AI capabilities.

Key Changes

In order to increase community participation in answering questions and making the program fairer and more transparent, we're excited to announce some changes to the Discord Support Program, such as the new Discord Leaderboard in HBOT Tracker!

Announcing Botcamp and the Expanding Hummingbot Ecosystem

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In late 2021, Hummingbot Foundation was launched as an experimental decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) to build a self-sustainable, professional-grade, free and open source operating system for algo traders and market makers, owned by the community of HBOT token holders.

In an industry perceived by outsiders to be zero-sum and mercenary, Hummingbot aimed to prove that crypto algorithmic trading could be positive-sum, given the proper incentive structure. Our mission is to give everyone access to free tools and knowledge that help them make money by doing the same basic job, providing liquidity and making markets more efficient, as the world's most secretive, sophisticated quantitative hedge funds.

It's been a long road filled with landmines and near-misses (like FTX!), but Hummingbot Foundation expects to be economically sustainable going forward, thanks to our partnerships with leading exchanges and blockhain protocols. Economic viability allows the Foundation to focus on decentralizing governance and leveraging the community to expand the value of the Hummingbot codebase.

Announcing Botcamp

Vitally, the Foundation is also sustainable in large part due to Botcamp, an educational side business that the Foundation team started to train algo traders and market makers using Hummingbot.

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Botcamp's signature product is a 5-week intensive bootcamp that teaches students how to help them build their own custom trading strategies. Since October 2022, Over 200 students across five cohorts have taken Botcamp, and many of the sample scripts in the open source Hummingbot repo were contributed by Botcamp students.

Today, we’re excited to formally announce Botcamp as a separate for-profit company that provides education and training programs for market makers and algorithmic traders using the open source Hummingbot software framework.

Botcamp's products include:

Hummingbot 2024 Technical Roadmap: Innovating for the Future

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After a year of significant milestones in 2023, we're excited to announce the 2024 Hummingbot technical roadmap! Our plans are geared towards enhancing the usability, functionality, and scalability of our platform. Building on the emergence of the V2 framework, we are excited to introduce a range of innovative features that will redefine algorithmic trading for our users.

Here what we expect to deliver from a technical standpoint in 2024:

2023: A Year of Innovation at Hummingbot

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As we are assembling the roadmap for the new year, it's important to reflect on the strides Hummingbot has made from an engineering standpoint in 2023.

In the 2023 Technical Roadmap, we defined 4 key goals:

  1. Expand Top Exchange Connectors: Update connectors to latest standards, support market orders and lending/staking
  2. Optimize Hummingbot codebase: Streamline maintenance and move Gateway DEX connectors into a separate repo
  3. Expand Scripts Framework: Integrate indicators into the Scripts framework, add more examples, and make them configurable
  4. Support External Modules: Support community-built external modules like the Brokers orchestration repo

Let’s review each of these milestones versus the actual progress made in 2023:

State of the Foundation 2024

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As 2023 winds to a close, reported volumes from Hummingbot clients have reached an all-time high of $140M per day. Widespread usage of Hummingbot across 114 exchange venues spanning both official releases and unofficial forks shows that Hummingbot is becoming the industry standard for market maker connectivity.

Since it has been two eventful years have passed since the inception of the Hummingbot Foundation and the issuance of the HBOT token, we wanted to update the original Hummingbot Foundation whitepaper. Specifically, this post has three objectives:

  1. Provide a retrospective on the Foundation’s journey over the past two years,
  2. Propose changes to the Hummingbot governance system, and;
  3. Offer a preliminary HBOT allocation budget for 2024.

Introducing V2 Strategies

We are excited to formally introduce the V2 Strategy Framework! After months of testing by us and our community, we are confident that using this new framework to design and deploy strategies will improve your algo trading P&L!

V2 strategies bring unparalleled modularity, real-time adaptability, and backtesting capabilities to your trading arsenal, allowing you to design and deploy powerful, custom strategies with only a few tweaks to the template.

Revolutionizing Strategy Design with Modularity and Flexibility

V2 Strategies marks a departure from the more rigid structure of V1 strategies. It's crafted to enable users to create powerful, custom strategies, even those who may not have extensive Python programming experience.

Key Features:

  • Composable: The core of V2 strategies lies in their modularity, allowing users to create complex and customized trading strategies using simple modifications in the provided templates.
  • Real-Time: Leveraging real-time market data, V2 strategies dynamically adjust spreads and shift prices. This responsiveness to market changes optimizes profitability and minimizes risk, surpassing the capabilities of the static V1 strategies.
  • Backtestable: A crucial component of any trading strategy is the ability to test and refine it. V2 strategies excel in this aspect, offering comprehensive backtesting tools that enable detailed simulations with historical market data, accessible through the Dashboard.

Retrospective on the October 2023 Bot Battle

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October 2023 was a particularly notable month since it marked the official Bot Battle, an exclusive monthly bot trading competition for Botcamp members. With eyes set on the prize and minds focused on performance, we embarked on a journey that tested both our strategic prowess and our bots' capabilities.

Diving into the October Bot Battle

Commencing on October 27th and running through to October 30th, I, alongside my fellow active Botcamp members, took part in a vibrant competition designed to pit our automated trading strategies against one another. As per the rules, our arsenal included any Hummingbot strategy or script, with a starting capital of no more than 200 USDT and the mandate that no additional top-ups were allowed post-competition commencement.

Epoch 6 Polls Recap

Every quarter, Hummingbot Foundation organizes Polls, a quarterly process that lets HBOT holders vote on how the Foundation distributes its maintenance resources and bounty budgets across the 50+ CEX, DEX, and blockchain network connectors in the Hummingbot codebase.

This week, we completed the Epoch 6 polls which decide which connectors will be included in the Hummingbot codebase for the October, November, and December 2023 releases.

Read on to learn about which connectors made the cut!

⚔️ Beta Bot Battle Results and Roundup!

The Beta Bot Battle has concluded, and we're thrilled to present the outcomes to the broader Hummingbot community!

Over a 48-hour period in September, Hummingbot users competed to see whose bots could earn the most profits and trade the highest volume, starting with an 100 USDT initial balance on Binance.

This inaugural experiment was, in our view, a resounding success. Though the participation was limited due to it being the first edition, the energy and camaraderie displayed on the #competitions Discord channel were palpable. We celebrated numerous triumphs, empathized with the setbacks, and eagerly anticipated the insights from participant write-ups about effective strategies.

Let's delve into the results: