A crypto trading bot is mostly risk code

The strategy is the short part

Buy when this, sell when that. Most strategies fit in a page and many fit in a paragraph. If a bot were only its strategy it would be an afternoon's work, and the reason it is not is everything that has to be true for the strategy to run safely.

What the rest of the code does

Decides how much to risk on each position. Decides what happens when an order partially fills, or does not fill, or fills at a worse price than quoted. Decides what to do when the exchange stops responding mid-position. Decides when to stop entirely. None of that is the idea, and all of it is what separates a bot that runs from a bot that runs unattended.

The failure that costs the most

Not a wrong prediction. A bot that keeps trading through a condition it was never designed for: a stale price feed, a market halt, a fill it did not expect. A strategy being wrong loses one trade. A bot not noticing that its inputs are broken loses in a loop, quickly, and usually while nobody is watching.

What to build first

The stop. Before the strategy, before the backtest, write the conditions under which the thing turns itself off: maximum loss, maximum position, stale data, unexpected state. It is the least interesting code in the project and it is the only part that determines the worst case.

Live, right now, on this page

Read from a live market as this page rendered, through a public endpoint that needs no key. Read at 2026-10-11 15:16 UTC; accurate as of that time and not afterwards.

Common questions

See the number itself

Pages that read a live market and show what they read, updated while you look at them.

• Monero price, live, on an asset most exchanges no longer list, a perp on an asset many exchanges no longer list, so the spot it tracks is itself thin.
• Cardano price, live, and the gap between roadmap and market, a market that usually sits exactly on the venue's baseline funding rate.
• XRP price, live from a perpetual market, the largest perpetual book of the alt majors, where positioning shows up before price does.
• Bitcoin price today, the price a bot would read, from the same public endpoint.
• Pacifica funding rates, live, the rate a funding strategy watches, live.
• Microsoft stock price, live, through the tokenised share, an equity that never stops quoting, so a bot on it never has an off hours gap.
• AVAX price, live, and why the chain is really three chains, a chain whose activity can sit on any of three ledgers, so a bot has to know which one it reads.
• Pudgy Penguins price, live, and a token attached to a retail business, a market small enough that the spread decides the outcome, which is where a bot fails first.