Hello to all! While the Enigma team ($ENG) continues to make progress on the Enigma protocol — such as our recently announced partnership with Aion Network — we have also been hard at work on Catalyst in the past month. Catalyst, a platform for data-driven cryptoasset trading and investing, is our first application to be built on the Enigma protocol.

Recently we shared news about many Catalyst-focused partnerships, such as KyberNetwork, EtherDelta and Investfeed. We’ve also produced new video materials for Catalyst that make getting started easier than ever.

Today, the Enigma team is pleased to release Catalyst version 0.4. With the addition of support for dozens of new exchanges, paper trading, and more critical features, this is our biggest Catalyst release yet. Please read on for more details on our important new features and how you can use Catalyst to find your edge in the crypto markets. Information on getting started with Catalyst and contributing to our community is at the end of this post.

Dozens of New Exchanges Supported

While Catalyst is already powerful, supporting more exchanges is key to our goal of making Catalyst the strongest and most active crypto quantitative trading platform. In response to feedback from our developer community, we decided to integrate with CCXT, a popular open source library which aims to offer a consistent API for across exchanges. This move brings immediate support for dozens of new cryptoasset exchanges to our Catalyst user base, a huge leap forward.

CCXT currently interfaces with more than 90 exchanges. While we only validated a subset of these exchanges, all exchanges fully implemented in CCXT should work in Catalyst as well! The Catalyst community will continue to benefit from the expansion of CCXT, and our team will also contribute to the CCXT project at every opportunity.

Paper Trading

Paper trading is one of the most important new features in Catalyst, allowing users to validate the performance of trading strategies using real-time data. This is called “paper trading” because all trades are executed on paper only, instead of requiring the user to deploy capital. This allows you to get started with the trading features of Catalyst without risking real capital — very important for new users!

In Catalyst, paper trading (also known as forward performance trading) works just like live trading except that all trades are simulated, using the same model as with backtesting. This is a powerful way to challenge original strategies with out-of-sample data. Since cryptoasset price behavior is rapidly evolving, this can make backtesting particularly subject to many sampling biases.

Loading Local Price Data

As we continue to build a rich repository of price data for all cryptoasset exchanges, we wanted to offer a compelling solution for users who wish to make their own data locally available to Catalyst. As of this version, Catalyst users can now load their own historical pricing data from CSV files. With a simple ingestion command, this data will be available for backtesting just like currently available Catalyst price data.

Improved Simulation of Trading Fees

One major difficulty for active traders is that cryptoasset exchanges use many different fee structures. Most exchanges have a “maker” discount, rewarding liquidity providers. Some have different rates for different markets. Catalyst previously took the simplistic approach of assigning a fixed percentage fee to each simulated order.

In order to increase the accuracy of our backtesting tools, we have now collected and integrated data on the exact fee structure of each cryptoasset exchange. We use this information to realistically simulate fees in backtesting and paper trading. This is an important milestone in our goal of making Catalyst the most reliable and accurate quantitative crypto trading platform.

What’s Next

While these features are a major leap forward, we have big plans to continue expanding the capabilities of Catalyst. In addition, upcoming releases will leverage these powerful features by adding even more historical data and integrations to our repository. As to what exactly is coming up — another exciting announcement will follow very soon, so stay tuned!