Project Team Explores Cryptocurrency Possibilities

Cryptocurrencies have been peaking many people’s interest long before the 2017 Bitcoin spike. This large increase in trading volume and opportunity to capitalize on the ever-changing value of cryptocurrencies has become a more realistic strategy for large trading firms looking to turn a profit. The opportunity has become more attractive to individuals as another way to diversify their portfolios.

This phenomenon connected many of the members Spartan Blockchain Solutions and drove our interest in learning about the full potential that Blockchain has to offer.

The cryptocurrency team conducted research into cryptocurrency tools available today. It turns out that the only high quality, all-encapsulating APIs are not open-sourced and funded by investors who want to see a return on their investment.

For individuals intrigued by cryptocurrencies and interested in learning about them and possibly trading, there are two options:

1. Pay upwards of $300 to $500 a month for a corporate level software tools to research and gauge the crypto market
2. Use free products that only focus on specific aspects of cryptocurrency trading but no unifying information

The Spartan CryptoTracker is the answer the Spartan Blockchain Solutions’ cryptocurrency team designed to tackle this issue.

Spartan CryptoTracker

Our software is the unifying source for the many free cryptocurrency products available today. The goal of this software was to:

1. Gather and store all necessary information from open source APIs and the internet in a unified database
2. Give users the ability to visualize this information
3. Create a free API to distribute this hub of information

So, how did we accomplish this?

How it works

The software currently utilizes two APIs, CoinGecko and CoinDesk, in order to get all the data that we needed to create the charts and MongoDB to store this data. Mongo is a NoSQL database that is great for simple data storage, but it is different than anything we have learned in class which presented a learning curve. We were able to work with this new type of data storage with relative ease because of our prior experience.

For the data manipulation and visualization, we utilized NodeJS with an ExpressJS server, and ReactJS to display. Each of these frameworks was relatively new to our team and we learned how to use them through a few YouTube tutorials. Although we were able to apply our knowledge to create this visualizer, we have just broken into the expansive world of JavaScript.

Why is this important

I have tried to get into cryptocurrency trading before and I found it to be difficult process just to get setup; analyzing the market was nearly impossible because I couldn’t find all the information, I thought was necessary. Spartan CryptoTracker addresses this problem and will one day be a resource new trader can get all the information they need to learn about the crypto currency market.

For now, we only support Bitcoin, but are looking to build out support for Ethereum during the fall semester of 2020.

This software and eventual free external API will help lower the barrier to entering and learning about the coveted cryptocurrency market. It brings the bar from the $300/month to absolutely free which will hopefully contribute to the expansion of the Blockchain community as a whole and increase education about the unknown online currencies.

Moving forward

The primary goal of this project was to be able to set it up for future students to be able to continue building it out. Currently, we only have support for Bitcoin data, but since the type of data doesn’t change from one cryptocurrency to another it is only a matter of scraping together data for other currencies and altering our code to allow easily going between different coins. Another idea that we have been thinking about for next semester is adding the ability for the user to experiment with the settings of the charts so they can have the data displayed to match their site’s theme or put more emphasis on the market cap as opposed to high/low of a coin from day-to-day.

This is a great project that exposes our members to the financial side of Blockchain and allows them to interact with the moving cryptocurrency market while gaining analytical insight. Moving forward this cryptocurrency tracker/visualizer will serve as a great source of learning outside of the required curriculum as well as a building block for a great product in the future.