Bitcoin

Solo project creating a btc and altcoin market aggregator tracking 16 assets.

I started this project back in 2013 while interacting with Bitcoin and researching the myriad of altcoins popping up around that time. I wanted a better way to track and understand different cyptocurrencies and to do so I planned to combine different signals like network transactions, trading activity, repo commits, and community. There were already good sources for viewing the data independently, but I sought to overlay them into dashboards to provide much needed context and parse out some of the speculatory movements.

The Stack

I setup a crawler for gathering the data and a domain for showing the latest json feed. The stack used node, express, mongo, and meteor for the front-end. The data included buy/sell depth, top 3 exchange share, transactions, hashrate, difficulty, github issues, reddit posts, and confirmation time, to name a few. Below shows of a rollup for the altcoin, Litecoin:

Crypto Comparison

While it was useful to look at a single coin in different ways, there was also value in comparing them alongside one another. This would serve as a landing page for the project and a navigation for which ones were available. Initially there were to be 16 different cryptocurrencies aggregated, but over time I narrowed the list to 9 including bitcoin.

Mobile View

Below shows mobile view for the project DogeCoin, which I briefly mined and traded for Bitcoin. If you scroll to the bottom of the window, you can see the price of Bitcoin at the time, which is an unbelievable snapshot of how it was valued in comparison to what has transpired since.

Conclusion

This project ran solo (and for fun) into 2014. The biggest challenge was expanding features while keeping the existing data sources clean. Eventually the crawler was turned off, but I have continued to build from the work done in node.js and charting data directly into prototypes. A few years later, this project purpose remains more than relevant for the burgeoning ICO landscape. And thankfully, I managed to hold onto a little Bitcoin.