Looking for arbitrage opportunies with JavaScript library ccxt supporting 70+ exchanges

These days with so many alt-currencies and so many exchanges there is bound to be potential arbitrage opportunities, however identifying and acting on those opportunities is a monumental task.

To be competitive you have to automate. I've been looking through GitHub to see what code is publicly available when I discovered ccxt. https://github.com/ccxt-dev/ccxt#ccxt--cryptocurrency-exchange-trading-library

A hugely impressive code base that supports 70+ exchanges.

It's written in JavaScript for Node.js but they have transpiled versions for both Python and PHP. Here's a list of the features.

• support for many exchange markets, even more upcoming soon
• fully implemented public and private APIs for all exchanges
• all currencies, altcoins and symbols, prices, order books, trades, tickers, etc...
• optional normalized data for cross-exchange or cross-currency analytics and arbitrage
• an out-of-the box unified all-in-one API extremely easy to integrate
• works in Node 7.6+, Python 2 and 3, PHP 5.3+, web browsers

OK, that looks great let's play around with it and see what it can do!

You will need to install the latest Node.js https://nodejs.org/en/download/ to run the code.

Download the latest source code from https://github.com/ccxt-dev/ccxt/archive/master.zip and unzip it into the directory you would like to work with.

Next, you will need to install it's requirements. Open up the command line, navigate to the directory you unzipped cctx and run npm install. This will take a few minutes to download the packages cctx relies on.

Notice that their is a script arbitrage-pairs.js in the examples/js/ directory.

From the command line run node examples/js/arbitrage-pairs.js hitbtc2 bittrex poloniex. This will grab all the supported pairs supported by HitBTC Bittrex and Poloniex. Why those 3? Because they support trading STEEM!

Here is the output.

As you can see cctx quickly grabbed a list of all the trading pairs supported by HitBTC, Bittrex and Poloniex.

Unfortunately cctx does not have an example to compare the prices. But looking at how well cctx is made I should be able to write an example to compare prices fair easily.

In the next post I will write a simple script to compare prices and find those profitable arbitrage opportunities.

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