Set up your first bot
In your browser, open the Bot Manager (if installed on your PC, go to http://localhost:3000, if deployed in the cloud, go to http://[server-ip-address]:3000).
From this screen, you can add your first bot by clicking the ‘Add new bot’ button. Then click the ‘Dashboard’ button for your new bot and a new browser tab should open with a configuration screen for your bot.
That’s it, you’re in, and almost ready to start balancing!
Note: instead of using the browser, you can set up BB to run as a desktop application. See here for more information.
Configure your bot
The application opens on the configuration screen. You’re 4 steps away from launching your bot:
- Select your exchange and enter your exchange API details. BB has been developed for Binance as the primary exchange, but it does support other exchanges as well. For more information, please see here. If you have never created API keys, check your exchange’s documentation for help
- Adjust your coin settings. First of all, here you configure which base coin (supported options: BTC, ETH, PAXG, EUR, USD, USDT, USDC, USDP, BUSD and TUSD) to use for your trades. BB then uses the exchange’s API to check which coins are in your trading account. All available coins that can be traded with the selected base coin will be listed in this step. You can now select coins that you may want to exclude from balancing. For the remaining coins you can use the sliders to indicate with which distribution you want to balance. By default, all coins will get an even distribution, and if you’re happy with that, you don’t have to change anything here. Optionally, you can use a coin’s market cap or the square root of its market cap to determine its target distribution. To do so, set the ‘Distribution Mode’ accordingly, and move the slider all the way to the left for every coin for which you want to use this option. NOTE: you can only activate this option after you have entered a CoinMarketCap API key in the Bot Manager’s settings. You can create a free CoinMarketCap API key here
- Set your liquidity. If you just start balancing now, you can accept the defaults in this screen and move to the next step. However, if you ever want to adjust the liquidity in your balancing portfolio, e.g. by adding or removing coins, enter the changes in this step. The liquidity information is used to calculate the performance of your portfolio, so it’s worth investing a bit of time to get this set up properly. For further hints on how to do this, please hover your mouse over the (i) icon on the configuration screen. Also, for further background on how liquidity changes are relevant and used in BB, have a look here
- Enter some general settings. Give your bot a name and set the threshold at which coins need to be balanced. This threshold is a percentage, representing the relative deviation from the target distribution. The default is set to 3%. Let’s say you have 10 coins, each with a target distribution of 10%, then BB starts selling/buying coins when the actual distribution is above 10.3% or below 9.7%. If you run BB in the cloud, on a server with a different time zone, then you can adjust the time here, so timestamps are shown in your local time. Indicate if you want BB to run automatically, or if you want to use it in manual mode. It is advisable to start in manual mode, so you can make sure everything is set up and working as expected. Once you feel comfortable, you can change this setting to automatic mode, lean back and let BB do its thing. And finally, set the so-called cooldown trigger. This is a protection mechanism against highly volatile trading conditions and/or problems with the exchange’s API, or any other cause for your bot to go wild. You can specify the maximum number of trades executed in the time span of 5 minutes. If this number is reached, BB will cool down for 1 hour and during that 1 hour no further trades will be executed. After 1 hour, trading automatically resumes.
Balance based on market cap
Optionally, you can use a coin’s market cap to determine its target distribution. To do so, follow these steps:
- Create a free CoinMarketCap API key here
- Enter the CoinMarketCap API key in the Bot Manager’s settings
- In the bot’s configuration, step 2, enable the ‘Distribute based on market cap’ option
- Move the slider all the way to the left for every coin for which you want to use its market cap, so that the slider shows ‘=’
- For coins that you don’t want to balance based on their market cap, set the slider to a specific value, other than ‘=’
The market cap data will be fetched from CoinMarketCap every 60 minutes, and the target distribution for the selected coins will then be adjusted accordingly.
NOTE: the free CoinMarketCap API key allows for up to 10.000 requests per month. As a result, you can enable this function for up to 12 bots (or 13 if you want to push it).
Multi-instance
You can use BB to run multiple bots in parallel. To add a new bot, go back to the Bot Manager, and click the ‘Add new bot’ button again. A second bot will be created and appear on the screen. As before, you can access the new bot by clicking the ‘Dashboard’ button.
The Bot Manager can also be used to (temporarily) stop bots, or completely delete obsolete bots.
Configure Telegram
It is highly recommended to connect BB to Telegram. This makes it possible to:
- Receive notifications from your bot(s) in Telegram. This includes notifications on executed orders, but also system notifications, e.g. in case of problems
- Check the status of BB to make sure your bot(s) are still running properly
- Restart your bot(s)
- Use Telegram to temporarily approve access to BB from a non-whitelisted IP address
- Use Telegram for 2FA (two-factor authentication) when logging in to BB
- If you’ve forgotten your BB password, receive a new password via Telegram
To connect BB to Telegram, you need to create a so-called Telegram bot (not to be confused with your BB bot). You can set this up in the Bot Manager, under Settings, by following these steps:
- Create a Telegram bot by sending ‘/newbot’ to the BotFather (Telegram’s uber bot): https://t.me/botfather
- Answer BotFather’s questions, i.e. pick a name and a username for your bot
- Copy the token provided by BotFather and paste it into the appropriate settings fields in the Bot Manager
- Enter your personal Telegram username (your name on Telegram preceded by @, NOT the username for your Telegram bot) in the settings*
- Open your Telegram bot using the link provided by BotFather: t.me/[yourbotname]
- Tap the ‘start’ button at the bottom, or type ‘/start’ to activate the bot and for further instructions
* If you’re not sure what your Telegram username is, you can find it in Telegram by going to Settings and then Edit Profile. It is the name that has a @ as a prefix. If you don’t see a username in your profile, you need to add a username first.