Hey QC community,

We are excited to announce the launch of cryptocurreny backtesting and live trading on QuantConnect! We’ve partnered with GDAX to support their cryptocurrency exchange.  Using your GDAX account, your algorithms can now trade BTC, LTC and ETH currency pairs. Huge thanks to our community members who helped make Lean ready for crypto. In this post, I’ll demonstrate backtesting a cryptocurrency trading algorithm using python and describe how you can get started live trading cryptocurrencies with GDAX.

Attached is a simple backtest that demonstrates subscribing to BTCUSD hourly data and placing an BTCUSD market order. Initially, QuantConnect is offering a limited set of GDAX quote data for BTCUSD for backtesting, however, users can expect our crypto data library to grow soon. Clone the backtest below to start building your crypto trading algorithms.

In order to get your algorithm live trading, sign up for a GDAX account here: https://www.gdax.com/ . To live trade, you’ll need an api key, api secret and api passcode.  To get this information, login to your GDAX account and click API from the menu in the top right corner. Create a new API key that has permissions to ‘view’ and ‘trade’ and be sure to record the api key, api secret and api passcode. You now have all the information needed to launch your live crypto-trading algorithm! Simply click ‘Go Live’ from your algorithm and follow the wizard. Be sure to select Gdax as your brokerage.

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