Archiving open source Gekko

I’m archiving the main Gekko repo (askmike/gekko), officially laying down all my involvement in the open source project. The reason is that all my trading moved into my trading company: Folkvang.

Seven years ago I started working on an idea on Github: Gekko, an EMA crossover bot that automatically trades on Mt. Gox. The project has grown tremendously over the last few years. As the crypto trading landscape kept evolving with exchanges coming and going, Gekko grew and became bigger in every single way.

It’s been an amazing journey for Gekko and the countless people who helped build, maintain and use Gekko. For me, the best part about Gekko wasn’t the code I pushed to Github, but the active and excited trading community that it spawned; connecting people and ideas from across the world. Ideas not bound to whatever restrictions I placed in the code (of which there were many, as I strictly enforced my vision on all Github pull requests and documentation changes).

And I mean ideas from other people, about what awesome things can be done using the Gekko core backtesting engine. Such as running custom genetic algorithms on top of Gekko:

And the ideas weren’t limited to pushing technical boundaries, many started gathering Gekko strategy files on their own websites, on Github and many other places. Many contributors also posted guides and videos on how to do things within the Gekko ecosystem:

There have even been a few people who tried to exploit the Gekko project for their own illicit personal gain. Gekko downloads with pure malware have floated around youtube and the web for a long time. Siraj Naval, a famous Youtuber, took this one step further: He ripped all the code of the Gekko project, written by me and almost 200 other people, put his own name on it and pushed a video bragging about the trading bot he built. That video gathered 200,000 views. Here is a video of the situation:

All in all it was an amazing journey! For me and many other people that worked on and used Gekko. I am thankful for everyone that played a part in this, from reviewing and contributing code, to play a role in the one of many communities (the forum, on Github, on Slack, on Telegram), to even uploading YouTube video guides!

What’s happening now

Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to keep the project up to date in the last few months. I’ve come to the point where I need to face the reality: I just don’t have the time and energy to maintain the open source Gekko anymore as I once had.

I’m archiving the main repo on github.com/askmike/gekko, to make it clear to everyone I am not involved anymore. The code will be ‘read only’ but will remain accessible forever.

That said, there are many active forks of Gekko. Many of them being a lot more active than my repo has been. I would love to see those continue to thrive and get a life of their own, without my involvement. But I’m keeping my hands of for now.

So long, and thanks for all the fish!

Mike