An onslaught of lines, candlesticks, and indexes dominate the six monitors that sit on top of an immaculately organized vintage table where @CryptoShark, trading apostle on Twitter and the anonymous founder of ChartEx, a charting platform used on decentralized exchanges who asked only to be identified by their social media persona, is organizing their thoughts for their next move. Amid the seemingly convoluted shapes and spikes, the founder intricately marks their positions on their charts to indicate what the course of action would be if certain scenarios were to occur. These would then be executed by bots on the platform.
“I have to run and get some shopping in 10 minutes. I’m marking my positions now so I don’t need to worry about missing out on possible opportunities,” they say while clicking away throughout the charts.
“You would think that being able to save your positions is ubiquitous in the DeFi trading industry, but for whatever reason, it is only starting to pick up now,” CryptoShark adds.
Starting in 2017 as a platform originally intended only for themself and a few of their friends, CryptoShark built web-based trading bots that allowed traders to interactively chart Binance assets during a time when platforms to do so were unavailable. The idea first came to fruition when they decided that they couldn’t simply stare at charts for opportunities to emerge and that tools may help them participate in the market in a more effective and streamlined manner.
Staying relatively inconspicuous for a time, it was during the summer of 2020, when Uniswap and DeFi experienced an upward trajectory, when ChartEx saw considerable interest among traders who needed a platform to assist in their trades.
“All of a sudden, everyone was using it. I had 25,000 users within the first 24 hours of people finding it. I never really intended for ChartEx to be found or turn into a business, but the demand is clearly there. That’s when I decided to share it with the world,” CryptoShark says without taking their eyes off the monitors.
It is perhaps ChartEx’s origins that sets it apart from its peers. As a tool originally designed to help traders, it strives to provide a fully interactive charting experience that allows users to customize their charts according to their desired outcomes or positions. This is on top of several premium releases that have been rolled out just last week which allow users to anonymously create accounts using web3 technology, thereby enabling them to save their work – a feature long requested by users not only of ChartEx, but also the industry as a whole.
Why *does* such an innocuous and seemingly ubiquitous feature plays such a key role in effective trading? Any experienced trader who understands the intricacies of trading will recognise the amount of time it takes to painstakingly identify patterns, setting up charts, and configuring bots to perform the actions they specifically want it to execute. Naturally, taking the time to redo the entire process each time traders wish to participate in the market is frustrating and can by some measures even be considered an opportunity cost. Time *is* money after all.
Nonetheless, CryptoShark is not satisfied with providing just one feature on their platform. As a trader who began during the early enigmatic days of crypto trading, they understand the struggles traders face when essential tools are not available. The anxiety involved with the continuous thoughts of missing out on opportunities or the possibility of losing out on positions is a problematic conundrum that participants in the market know all too well. These experiences furthered CryptoShark’s drive to conceptualize and build new features that would streamline users’ trading experience.
“As humans, we are not biologically nor societally designed to sit in front of a screen at all times. We have various things we need to do in life on top of simply trading. Yet the anxiety of being away from one’s trading chart is a struggle that traders can’t seem to get over,” CryptoShark melancholically.
“That’s why I presumed that it would perhaps be ideal for traders to be informed of price alerts no matter where they are through Telegram bots,” CryptoShark added as their face lights up.
This is a notable proposition given that it would make trading data accessible to traders regardless of where they may be. According to CryptoShark, users will be able to access data for all tokens on Binance Smart Chain’s Dex’s, most notably PancakeSwap, BurgerSwap, and BakerySwap, giving them the ability to make trade decisions remotely.
Again, this amounts to the mitigation of opportunity costs that traders may incur if they were to be away from their trading station. While not all of ChartEx’s features have been rolled out in this release, CryptoShark is confident that those currently available to users will nonetheless streamline their trading experience.
“As the most recent release comes to a conclusion, the team and I will be working towards beta testing for a few of the platform’s other features, including the Telegram bots and Whale and Wallet Watchers,” they say just before leaving for the store.
“Our ethos remains the same as when we first started ChartEx: effective trading goes beyond staring at a screen and is achievable with the use of effective tools that help traders.”