Visualising the Bitcoin futures curve on Android

During the summer I built a web application to visualise the Bitcoin futures curve which proved very useful in informing my trading decisions.

As useful as it was however, each time I viewed it I had to wait for the application to first boot on Heroku and then to perform a sequence of API calls to Deribit before the chart could finally be rendered in the browser.

Impatience as the mother of invention

I’d no other major projects that needed attention so building a more responsive native application seemed like a reasonable task to take on.

As before, everything I needed to do from making network requests to integrating a charting library was achievable with the help of a search engine. Knowing I’m not using best-practice is frustrating but the experience has to come from somewhere and it’s ultimately the results that matter.

Building a network application with Go is straightforward and in this case the service interrogates the exchange API once a minute, caching the results and making them available as JSON over HTTP.

Another bearish chart

Coincidentally like last time the resulting chart shows a lower annualised yield on the shorter tenor contracts than on those that expire further out so a bearish outlook for the short to medium term.

I’ve been pleased with how useful I’ve found this project and when it shows signs of a more bullish sentiment I’ll be keen to commit more capital after closing out a couple of positions during the most recent dump.

The code

Both the web service and the Android app are available on GitHub.