Recrypto enables submission of market orders via Coinbase Pro (formerly GDAX) APIs. If you configure this to run periodically, you can easily set up a dollar cost averaging investment process for a wide varity of crypto assets.
Coinbase recently posted an artcile titled When is the “perfect time” to buy cryptocurrency? where the author covers the concept of dollar cost averaging. In a nutshell, this concept centers around periodic and incremental purchases of an underlying asset. Coinbase also highlights how you can get started today, but I want to share an alternative: you can run your own software to do this for you (ie. the code found in this repo!). Disclaimer: This is not investment advice. Use this software at your own risk.
Why may you want to do this?
- You can build an investment in a crypto asset by dollar cost averaging into it. I'll leave it up to you to assess if that is something you want to do!
- You can save (a little) money in the long run: Coinbase appears to charge $0.99 / recurring buy, while running this script uses Coinbase Pro (formly GDAX) so you'll typically only pay fees of 0.05% to 0.25%. If you were buying $10.00 USD of BTC per day, that's $0.99 per day in fees vs fees that would range from $0.01 to $0.03 in my experience. You do need a computer to run this for you, but you can host it somewhere or buy a pi (which is what I've been doing for the past few years)
- You'll probably have fun! You'll likely learn something by setting this up and running it on your own. You can also help improve it, just send me a pull request. This was my first attempt at writing anything in Python, so there is probably loads to improve upon.
Assuming you already have a Coinbase account, next you need to set up an API access.
- Go to API settings on Coinbase Pro, which is under Account (your name) > API > API Settings
- Tap on "+ New API Key" and ensure you select the "View" and "Trade" permissions
Ensure that you've funded the account, otherwise the script will submit a buy order, and you'll have no funds to use!
$ git clone https://github.com/jeffreyiacono/recrypto
$ cd recrypto
$ pip3 install virtualenv
$ virtualenv vrecrypto
$ source vrecrypto/bin/activate
$ pip3 install -r requirements.txt
When you set up API Access, you were given a passphrase, key, secret, and account ID.
Using recrypto/accounts/template.yaml as a starting point, change the filename to to
your name (or whatever you'd like) and enter in your account's details. DO
NOT SHARE THOSE WITH ANYONE ELSE.
You can also set up the USD amount you'd like to purchase on each run. It is currently set to $10.00 USD as that is the minimum order Coinbase Pro will accept as of 2018 (as far as I recall).
Note that running the following, if set up properly, will submit a request to buy a given coin and will buy the amount you've specified in your account template.
For example, if you have used recrypto/accounts/template.yaml and cp it to
recrypto/accounts/jeff.yaml and set it up as follows:
# recrypto/accounts/jeff.yaml
gdax:
passphrase: 'some-passphrase'
key: 'some-key'
secret: 'some-secret'
accounts:
usd_id: 'some-account-usd-id'
trading:
btc:
buy_amount_usd: 20
and I run:
$ python3 market_buyer.py --account=jeff --coin=btc
It will kick off a request to Coinbase Pro to purchase $20.00 USD in BTC.
Lastly, if you want to have this purchase on your behalf, you'll need to instruct your computer to run this script at whatever time intervals you'd like.
You can use something like cron to do this, and there is an example file
provided within the repo called crontab-example
Buy me a coffee!
Send LTC to the following address: LMxcMA4Z9rRnVxJa5QfPxnWr9Moi9wGyKp
or scan the following QR code:
Send ETH to the following address: 0x85e38a2F652f59b6e61620264eC08Bdd3f35dE42
or scan the following QR code:
Send BTC to the following address: 1KrG49xxxtRVTnGkM2xwF6mf9JFnB3yMRA
or scan the following QR code:
Copyright (c) 2019 Jeff Iacono
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