Acacia Trading

In 2014, when I was a sophomore in high school, two of my good friends approached me and told me about an exciting new technology called Bitcoin. I thought it was a strange idea, but after much prodding, I decided it was worth a shot. The culmination of this deep-dive into crypto was Acacia Trading.

2014 was the very early days of cryptocurrency, and so there weren’t many automated trading options. Most of the available ones on the market had to be run locally, which involved a lot of user effort to get up and running; not to mention the poor reliability of running your own server without experience. Given these market conditions, we decided to build a simple-to-use, cloud-based, automated trading platform.

Our basic platform would integrate with your exchange account, and execute trades on your behalf. We built out many indicators, and created a plug-and-play template in which users could specify values at which to trade. We also provided a framework in which users could backtest their algorithms across the data of the various different exchanges. We saw surprising success. We quickly grew, and at its peak, Acacia Trading had customers in 30+ countries. We became one of the larger players in the (at the time) small market of automated crypto trading.

Ultimately, we had to shut down operations of the company in 2016, when each of the founders parted ways for college. We would not have the time to maintain a platform with paying users, and we felt that this would be the most responsible path.

If you’re interested in what we built, or want to base your own trading platform on the code, we open-sourced our code.