jeffreyiacono/recrypto

DIY recurring crypto purchases

Recrypto

Recrypto enables submission of market orders via Coinbase Pro (formerly GDAX) APIs. If you configure this to run periodically, you can easily set up a dollar cost averaging investment process for a wide varity of crypto assets.

Background

Coinbase recently posted an artcile titled When is the “perfect time” to buy cryptocurrency? where the author covers the concept of dollar cost averaging. In a nutshell, this concept centers around periodic and incremental purchases of an underlying asset. Coinbase also highlights how you can get started today, but I want to share an alternative: you can run your own software to do this for you (ie. the code found in this repo!). Disclaimer: This is not investment advice. Use this software at your own risk.

Why may you want to do this?

• You can build an investment in a crypto asset by dollar cost averaging into it. I'll leave it up to you to assess if that is something you want to do!
• You can save (a little) money in the long run: Coinbase appears to charge $0.99 / recurring buy, while running this script uses Coinbase Pro (formly GDAX) so you'll typically only pay fees of 0.05% to 0.25%. If you were buying $10.00 USD of BTC per day, that's $0.99 per day in fees vs fees that would range from $0.01 to $0.03 in my experience. You do need a computer to run this for you, but you can host it somewhere or buy a pi (which is what I've been doing for the past few years)
• You'll probably have fun! You'll likely learn something by setting this up and running it on your own. You can also help improve it, just send me a pull request. This was my first attempt at writing anything in Python, so there is probably loads to improve upon.

Setup

Coinbase Pro API Access

Assuming you already have a Coinbase account, next you need to set up an API access.

1. Go to API settings on Coinbase Pro, which is under Account (your name) > API > API Settings
2. Tap on "+ New API Key" and ensure you select the "View" and "Trade" permissions

Ensure that you've funded the account, otherwise the script will submit a buy order, and you'll have no funds to use!

Get Recrypto Code

$ git clone https://github.com/jeffreyiacono/recrypto

Set Up The Virtual Environment & Install Required Packages

$ cd recrypto
$ pip3 install virtualenv
$ virtualenv vrecrypto
$ source vrecrypto/bin/activate
$ pip3 install -r requirements.txt

Configure Account Details

When you set up API Access, you were given a passphrase, key, secret, and account ID. Using recrypto/accounts/template.yaml as a starting point, change the filename to to your name (or whatever you'd like) and enter in your account's details. DO NOT SHARE THOSE WITH ANYONE ELSE.

You can also set up the USD amount you'd like to purchase on each run. It is currently set to $10.00 USD as that is the minimum order Coinbase Pro will accept as of 2018 (as far as I recall).

Test It Out

Note that running the following, if set up properly, will submit a request to buy a given coin and will buy the amount you've specified in your account template.

For example, if you have used recrypto/accounts/template.yaml and cp it to recrypto/accounts/jeff.yaml and set it up as follows:

# recrypto/accounts/jeff.yaml
gdax:
  passphrase: 'some-passphrase'
  key: 'some-key'
  secret: 'some-secret'
  accounts:
    usd_id: 'some-account-usd-id'
trading:
  btc:
    buy_amount_usd: 20

and I run:

$ python3 market_buyer.py --account=jeff --coin=btc

It will kick off a request to Coinbase Pro to purchase $20.00 USD in BTC.

Set It and Forget It

Lastly, if you want to have this purchase on your behalf, you'll need to instruct your computer to run this script at whatever time intervals you'd like.

You can use something like cron to do this, and there is an example file provided within the repo called crontab-example

Like This?

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MIT License

Copyright (c) 2019 Jeff Iacono

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.