How to setup your HODL.ZONE Bot
You may have read the previous article located here briefly explaining how HODL.ZONE works. If not, I recommend giving it a read. If you are interested in signing up to grow your HODLings, I will show you how easy it is to start. All we will need is a Poloniex account with some bitcoin.
The Poloniex Account
Poloniex is one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges in the US. I will not be going into how to obtains Bitcoins, or how to setup a Poloniex account. If you need assistance, you can join our slack, and we can personally help you or answer your questions.
You can signup for a Poloniex Account here: https://poloniex.com/signup
Making a HODL.ZONE account
Feel free to join our slack if you have any questions or comments about creating an account with HodlZone.
Signup: https://hodlzone-slack.herokuapp.com/
To make an account visit https://hodl.zone/ and click “Start Lending”
The next part is fairly straight forward. Please use a legitimate email address, as we have a verify email section, but currently do not enforce it.
Your account will look pretty barren since you are not setup. The initial dashboard will give you the quick rundown on how your crypto lending is going. From left to right:
- The current rate your crypto is being lent at, AKA your daily profit
- The amount of Bitcoin that you have actively lent (higher == good)
- The amount of Bitcoin that is currently not lent, but able to be lent (lower == good)
- The percentage of your total balance in lending that is lent. (higher == good)
Everything on the front page is measured in it’s BTC value. The chart on the left breaks down your crypto in lending per token. And the table on the right is your complete loans. Note the numbers at the top show the difference from last week’s averages.
To start lending, we need to get an API key for our Poloniex account. Sign into poloniex and go to “Settings” > “API Keys”
Click the “Create New Key” on this page. An API Key and a secret will be displayed, DO NOT ENABLE WITHDRAWS and DISABLE TRADING. If we detect the withdraw setting being on, we will delete the keys and will not lend on your behalf. Disabling trading ensures that we can only create loans and query about balances.
It should look like this when it is set, the keys have been redacted.
Keep this webpage open with the API Key and Secret and go back to HODL.ZONE. On the left of the dashboard, go to “Settings” > “Lending Settings”
Input the API Key and Secret. If you get a success message, then congrats! You are ready to begin lending. The bot needs to be enabled, and can be disabled at any time. If you scroll down, you’ll see those options:
To begin lending a particular crypto currency, click the enabled button and then “Apply”. The left options are the minimum loan rate for a given currency. This allows you to set the minimum rate the bot will loan, and any time the rate goes below that amount, the bot will go inactive until the rate goes above that rate. It is advised to set these if you do not wish to have low rates, but know that it can impact your lending uptime (amount of crypto actively lent)
Sweet! I’m done!
Almost! I promise we are close. The bot is going and trying to make you money, but there is a chance you aren’t making anything. Why? Well, it can only lend crypto in your lending account on Poloniex, so go back to Poloniex and ensure there is money in lending. Go to “Balances” > “Transfer Balances”
Transfer some BTC/BTS/CLAM/….. to the Lending section, and if you enabled it on HODL.ZONE, the lending will begin!
It’s not lending….
Hey, hey, hey. Patience is a virtue. I understand you want interest right now, and asking you to be patient is not what you expected, but hear me out!
The Bot is designed to resists dips in loaning, and it also aims to spread your loans out which makes your profit more resistant to sudden swings. The lending prices change by the minute, and this means lending all your Bitcoin immediately may not always be the best tactic (It’s usually not). To account for this, the Bot splits up your loans into smaller chunks, to grab local averages. It also lends based off the last hr, day, week, and month statistics, meaning sometimes it might take some time for the Bot to start seizing rates. But after letting it run for a few hours it has maintained > 95% lending uptime for the past 30+ days.
Now what?
Now what? What do you mean? You’re making money. Get a hobby, go out to lunch, brag to your friends that your HODLings are working for you.
All that is great, but if you are anything like us at HODL.ZONE, you like your numbers. You want to know your projected profit, your weekly breakdown, etc. All I ask is for you to be patient. We put most of our focus into the Bot, but are collecting statistics to make you some cool graphs in the upcoming weeks. If you have any suggestions of what features/tools/graphs you’d like to see, please drop by our Slack and let us know. This is an ongoing project, and we plan on sticking around for awhile.
