Cryptocurrency trading bots are an increasingly popular tool for nearly all crypto traders. Trading bots enable traders to deploy fully automated bitcoin and cryptocurrency trading strategies. As a result, there are now over 100 trading bots with varying prices for digital asset traders.

Fortunately, the crypto trading bot market is full of free, open-source bots that allow you to test out algorithmic trading before committing funds to a real deployment.

The Open Source Crypto Bot List

ZenBot

ZenBot is a popular crypto trading bot that has been around for a while. ZenBot stands out from its peers for the high number of supported exchanges and its array of advanced features, which include paper trading to test strategies in real-time, configurable order types, and a flexible sample period and trade frequency.

Features

• Fully-automated technical-analysis-based trading approach

• Supported Exchanges for Binance,  Bitfinex,  Bitstamp,  Bittrex,  CEX.IO,  GDAX,  Gemini,  HitBTC,  Kraken,  Poloniex and  TheRockTrading, work on further exchange support is ongoing.

• Plugin architecture for implementing exchange support, or writing new strategies

• Simulator for backtesting strategies against historical data

• "Paper" trading mode, operates on a simulated balance while watching the live market

• Configurable sell stops, buy stops, and (trailing) profit stops

• Flexible sampling period and trade frequency - averages 1-2 trades/day with 1h period, 15-50/day with 5m period

Gekko

As one of the first free bitcoin trading bots, Gekko has managed to establish itself as a popular option in the crypto trading bot market. The trading bot enables backtesting and live trading of a wide range of technical indicators across ten different digital asset exchanges. The bot can be installed on macOS, Windows, and Linux, and comes with an easy-to-use interface.

Features:

• Backtest: You can start a simulation of the strategy over a historical data period and Gekko will tell you what would have happened (which trades would have been performed as well as overall performance and risk metrics).

• Paper trader: You can run the strategy in real-time simulate trading (trade with fake money) to see in real-time how profitable your strategy would have been.

• Tradebot: You can run the strategy in real-time and automatically execute orders based on the signals.

Hummingbot

Built by CoinAlpha, Hummingbot is one of the latest additions to the crypto trading bot landscape. The bot enables traders to execute automated digital currency trading strategies on both centralized and decentralized exchanges.Built by CoinAlpha, Hummingbot is one of the latest additions to the crypto trading bot landscape. The bot enables traders to execute automated digital currency trading strategies on both centralized and decentralized exchanges.

Features:

• Pause and Resume : This feature allows users to pause a running strategy using a command

• Paper Trade Mode: This feature allows users to test Hummingbot and simulate trading strategies without risking any actual assets.

• Balance Limit: Sets the amount limit on how much assets Hummingbot can use in an exchange or wallet.

• Minimum Order Size: When setting the order_amount for pure market making or cross-exchange market making, Hummingbot has set its own minimum order size to help ensure orders are created when running the strategy.

• Performance History: Run the history command in Hummingbot to display the current duration of total past trades, assets inventory and value, market trading pair performance.

• Kill Switch: Automatically stops the bot when it reaches a certain performance threshold, which can be either positive or negative.

• Integrate Telegram: Integrating Hummingbot with Telegram Messenger allows you to get real-time updates and issue commands to your trading bot from any device where you have Telegram installed.

• Activate Debug Console: The debug console is a powerful tool for Hummingbot developers to inspect and modify the live states in Hummingbot while it's running.

• Rate Oracle: This new feature provides real time, most up-to-date exchange rate on any given token or currency from a reliable and trustworthy data source.

FregTrade

FreqTrade is a lesser-known open-source crypto trading bot. Aside from the standard backtesting and live trading features that all crypto trading bots possess, FreqTrade also offers a number of interesting advanced features, including strategy optimization by machine learning, position-sizing, and white/blacklisting of assets you want/do not want to trade. The bot can be used to trade on Binance and Bittrex.

Features

• Develop your Strategy: Write your strategy in python, using pandas. Example strategies to inspire you are available in the strategy repository.

• Download market data: Download historical data of the exchange and the markets you may want to trade with.

• Backtest: Test your strategy on downloaded historical data.

• Optimize: Find the best parameters for your strategy using hyper optimization which employs machining learning methods. You can optimize buy, sell, take profit (ROI), stop-loss and trailing stop-loss parameters for your strategy.

• Select markets: Create your static list or use an automatic one based on top traded volumes and/or prices (not available during backtesting). You can also explicitly blacklist markets you don't want to trade.

• Run: Test your strategy with simulated money (Dry-Run mode) or deploy it with real money (Live-Trade mode).

• Run using Edge (optional module): The concept is to find the best historical trade expectancy by markets based on variation of the stop-loss and then allow/reject markets to trade. The sizing of the trade is based on a risk of a percentage of your capital.

• Control/Monitor: Use Telegram or a REST API (start/stop the bot, show profit/loss, daily summary, current open trades results, etc.).

• Analyze: Further analysis can be performed on either Backtesting data or Freqtrade trading history (SQL database), including automated standard plots, and methods to load the data into interactive environments.

Tribeca

Tribeca is a low-latency market trading bot for centralized exchanges. Complete with a web client, Users can configure, test, and run their bot. It automatically set and adjust buy/sell orders with the potential to profit from the bid/ask spread.

Blackbird Bitcoin Arbitrage

Blackbird Bitcoin Arbitrage is a trading system built on C++ and was created as a means of addressing inefficiencies of Bitcoin’s value across exchanges. As the bid/ask prices vary depending on the exchange, the bot from Blackbird works to automatically profit from the temporary price differences, whilst remaining market-neutral.

Features

Unlike other Bitcoin arbitrage systems, Blackbird doesn't sell but actually short sells Bitcoin on the short exchange. This feature offers two important advantages:

1. The strategy is always market-neutral: the Bitcoin market's moves (up or down) don't impact the strategy returns. This removes a huge risk from the strategy. The Bitcoin market could suddenly lose half its value that this won't make any difference in the strategy returns.

2. The strategy doesn't need to transfer funds (USD or BTC) between Bitcoin exchanges. The buy/sell and sell/buy trading activities are done in parallel on two different exchanges, independently. Advantage: no need to deal with transfer latency issues.