New COSSbot Logo (courtesy of cyandit in our Discord)

Before we dive into the details of the progress made on COSSbot since our last article, we have one BIG announcement that needs to be made: After talking extensively with /u/Spielley, creator of CELT and one of the first individuals to successfully bot trade on COSS, he has decided to join the COSSbot development team and focus his efforts on the development of COSSbot’s automated trading strategies. The COSSbot Team is stoked and we’re excited to see what COSSbot can bring to the table with his help.

ICYMI, Update 1: https://medium.com/@jimmydeal/cossbot-development-update-1-76e64e5d92d2

Now for the Fun Stuff

Automated Validation Process Has Been Completed

Because coss.io doesn’t yet have a documented API with public/private keys that can be utilized to provide validation to COSS from external applications, the user was previously forced to manually pull the variable needed for validation purposes from COSS. This was obviously quite tedious and required users to know which specific values where needed and where they could be located on the site. However, since the last article, this process has been completely automated so that the user must simply navigate to the page that COSSbot specifies and click on our COSSbot Validation Chrome Extension. While this might not seem like a huge deal, it’s significantly increased ease of use of the bot. Please see the GIF below:

In the GIF you can see how the validation process has been automated.

COSSbot Validator Chrome Extension Has Been Completed

The COSSbot Validator Chrome extension is now fully functional (as can be seen in the GIF above). The extension will only undergo minor aesthetic design changes prior to full public release. With that being said, the extension is now privately listed on the Chrome Web Store, which means that the extension is already published and is simply awaiting final completion of COSSbot before being made publicly available. Because it is privately listed, Alpha/Beta testers will not have to manually install the extension from the source code, but will simply be provided with the link to add the extension to Chrome.

COSSbot Validator Chrome Web Store Listing

COSSBot Cross-Platform Compatibility Issues Have Been Resolved

Between the release of our last article and this one, our team encountered some issues in regards to compatibility across OS’s. Rather than devoting our time to fixing the issue immediately, we decided to push on with development on Windows (given that we weren’t experiencing issues with COSSbot execution on Windows) since the majority of users with dedicated hardware tend to be Windows based. However, as of the last few days we have resolved all cross-platform compatibility issues. The same version of COSSbot works on both Windows and OSx (and presumably works on Linux OS’s given that OSx and Linux both utilize bash in terminal).

Manual Trading Mode Almost Completed

Manual Mode is fully functional, but requires tweaking for user experience purposes. E.g. Rather than having COSSbot return all balance values, we want the user to be able to specify a currency/threshold of holdings to get balances for. Again, manual mode is fully functional, but just requires some minor tweaking to further simplify ease of use.

Here you can see how the user is guided through manual trading mode.

If you want to see more pictures of manual functionality, please refer to our first medium update linked at the top.

Ideally, we want users with zero technical background and knowledge of bash/DOS to be able to easily utilize COSSbot. The COSSbot teams believes that making COSSbot easy to use is the key to adoption and, ultimately, bringing sustainable volume to COSS across pairings via bot trading.

As you can tell, while we have focused on making the bot very simple to utilize within the command line interface, there still remains some work to be done in terms of ease of use. See GUI section below for further discussion on this subject.

GUI: A Work in Progress

Because we want to make COSSbot incredibly easy to use, we’ve started working on the GUI (Graphical User Interface) portion of the app. Thanks to the work of 2 members of our team that are dedicated to GUI development, we currently have in development both a desktop based GUI (not run in browser) and a localhost GUI (run in browser). Both offer similar functionalities and are a work in progress. We’ve continued developing both options because the native coding languages of our development team have made it so that we can progress on both without detriment to the actual progress of COSSbot itself.

The Desktop GUI:

The desktop GUI is aiming to:

offer a button to automate the installation of node.js/npm with one click automatically install/update needed node.js dependencies click to launch COSSbot display the command line for output from the bot, but make it so that all input for COSSbot is provided via the GUI rather than having to utilize the command line interface.

Here you can see the current implementation of the Desktop GUI. (Shoutout to ciprianveg on Discord)

The Web GUI:

This is a locally hosted server (aka your information remains only on your computer) that will also allow the user to interact with COSSbot through the GUI rather than having to utilize the command line interface.

Here you can see the current implementation of the Web/Browser based GUI. (Shoutout to ccrock4t on Discord)

Automated Trading: In Progress

Now that /u/Spielley has joined the team, the focus has been shifted to the completion of automated trading functionality. As you might expect, this is the largest task remaining to be completed prior to semi-public Alpha/Beta testing. Rest assured, we are taking our time to ensure that the strategy is well thought out and profitable over time. We will discuss further details of the strategy once we conclude testing and have selected our final implementation for the automated strategy. Note: Users will be required to provide certain inputs that influence the automated strategy. This will be done to ensure that not all bots will be running the exact same strategy, which would create some weird situations in terms of trading on the exchange.

Testing and Release

We plan to offer private Alpha and Beta testing spots (soft-capped) for users in an attempt to help fund the development of COSSbot prior to the free public release. Note that any Alpha/Beta testers will be the first to submit feedback and, as such, feedback from these testers will be prioritized prior to the free public release. In the meanwhile, we have deployed an ETH Multisig Wallet (address: 0x39e0a28c888978f15177f5c7d12e56a899e41293), which myself, HeavyCream, and Thaodehx (neither directly involved in the coding of COSSbot) are owners of. Any withdrawal to the dev team from the contract address requires 2/3 owner confirmations, so rest assured that any donated funds will be safe and only utilized as intended. We will honor donations retroactively for testing spots; more details to come about testing phases in the next week.