How I started Poloniex Ninja and why traders love it

What is Poloniex Ninja?

An open-source Chrome extension which provides you with an enhanced one-page overview of your coins on Poloniex in real time.

You must forgive me, as this image is somewhat out of date and I've added more columns and features as time progressed.

How I got into crypto and trading

I've boarded the Cryptocurrency hype train some time in March 2017. Near the end of the month, I've started trading on Poloniex and learned a lot about trading and how cryptocurrencies work.

Soon, tracking the prices of coins became an addiction and an obsession I couldn't easily shake off. I've enjoyed being a day trader for some time but realized that I'm essentially doing the same set of things all the time, which became exhausting.

What really ground my gears

Those micro-calculations would take up majority of my time spent on the trading platform. Already then I felt that something was missing and had to be done to make this easier...

To tackle this problem I asked myself two fundamental questions:

1. What are traders actually doing to make money?
2. How can I minimize the number of steps to achieve this?

The answer to the first question is already known and can be summarized as: Buy low & sell high. This, however, raises the question about what low and high mean, or at least the relative difference between the two - better known as the growth rate. I also like to look at this as your personal margin: what percentage of earnings do you aspire to?

Crypto is very volatile and often insane if you consider the variance, I usually opt for a small margin when I trade short term, say 15-20%. Please note that this is a matter of personal choice, it is my opinion and is not in any way a trading advice.

To attack the second problem, I had to do a bit of introspection to capture where I was spending my time. I started of with some spreadsheets writing down the prices, growth rates etc. I often used the chrome address bar for back of the envelope calculations. After some time, I realized I was always doing the same calculations and answering the same two questions:

• What is my balance of this coin in USD?
• How much did the price change since I last bought this coin?

It turned out that these were quite simple formulas and I shouldn't be spending my time doing this low-level analysis. This is something which should always be annotated with the coin balance as it is trivial and yet actionable.

How Poloniex Ninja was born

The only thing standing in my way of solving those problems was a mixture of lazyness and lack of time. In early May I've been attending the driving school and had the theory exam which I managed to fail in my first try. There was a trick question regarding a junction and priority which was very open to interpretation since it was a WHY question rather than a IN WHICH ORDER question...

I've been pretty angry at the outcome of that exam so I decided to ease my mind and spend the afternoon scratching the itch caused by this other thing which started to be quite annoying (i.e. the trading "micro").

In a single afternoon I produced a working solution to the most common calculations and packaged it as a Chrome extension. After about a week I decided to release the extension on the Chrome web store, but keep it unlisted to see if I can get some early adopters through twitter.

They loved it!

To my surprise, people started catching on and helping me fix issues. My initial expectation was, oh, I don't know, if this thing ever gets to 50 or 100 users I'd be happy to know some folks find it useful. Boom! A 100 users in less than a month! Soon after that, I published the extension so people can find it on the Chrome web store and the user base kept growing.

Believe it or not, Poloniex Ninja was featured in a YouTube video covering some trading tips. This was a self-initiative of one of my early adopters. I was completely blown away by this ! :-D

Today, after less than 3 months and $0 of marketing, Poloniex Ninja has close to 1000 users. This probably means I'm doing something right or Poloniex is doing something wrong. In any case, I'm happy how things are going and that traders find value in the project.

I think I made a few good decisions right from the start and I believe those were essential to gain acceptance and give value to traders:

• Make it open source - allow the users to see how the project progresses and gain contributions and feedback, have a single place where we can improve the tool and have documentation to answer the most common questions
• Be upfront with privacy and security - not to collect any data from the user or make actions which the user did not willfully and consciously take, restrict the permissions to the minimum required to operate
• Have an announcement channel - use Twitter to announce new features and releases so users know when to update
• Have a clear and consistent visual - allow users to understand which parts of the page are artifacts of the extension and which are the base Poloniex elements, ensure it works in both night and day modes
• Converge to real-time - strive to have the balances page up to date in real time to minimize refreshing the page
• Be mindful of performance - nobody likes janky pages and long loading time, especially crashes
• Minimize impact to Poloniex - mass adoption would raise considerable stress to their system, keep the API calls within reasonable bounds and never overcommit, rather do a best effort approach
• Keep it simple and customizable - allow users to choose what they want to see and how the extension should behave

There are at least a few more reasons why people keep using PoloNinja and I'm excited to gain more insight. Are you a PoloNinja user? Let me know!

Did I succeed?

So far, I've received a few donations which show support for the project. The amounts are close to symbolic but I value them as they display acceptance and drive my passion to continue improving the tool.

The giveaway

This month I started a giveaway programme to raise awareness and get more Poloniex users to try the extension. Thus far people seem not to want the free bitcoin coming their way, but that can still change.