Please, whatever you do, don’t confuse this post for investment or financial advice.
With coin prices regularly fluctuating 10% in mere days, you may want to slowly accumulate instead of stressing over charts all day to time the market moves.
In traditional markets, the “dollar-cost average” is a common technique for accumulating assets with a fixed amount of your fiat currency (dollars, euros, yen, etc) on a regular schedule. But in crypto, if you’d rather sit back and stack sats than frantically trade every time “You Suffer” by Napalm Death blasts from your speakers, there aren’t many options.
Want to average-in to Bitcoin, Litecoin, Ethereum? There’s only one place you can do it, and they charge a minimum 1.5% fee per transaction. Want to use your BTC holdings to average in to MLN on Kraken? Or use your ETH to average in to XMR on Binance? You’re out of luck.
Cryptowatch exists to make it easier for you to trade and invest in crypto. Since we work across major exchanges to execute orders, we are in a unique position to give clients the power to “average in” to multiple assets wherever they may trade. This post is about giving you that dollar-cost averaging formula.
You can now average in to 400+ assets across 7 major exchanges using Cryptowatch’s new Zapier integration.
You need a Cryptowatch Pro plan to get started, which includes the Zapier integration and much more. If you want to purchase crypto based on a fixed amount of fiat currency, you’ll also need a Zapier Starter plan. If you just want to buy a fixed amount of crypto on a regular schedule, you can use a free Zapier account — just skip Step 2 below.
Step 1: Create a Zap in Zapier
First, open Zapier. Create an account / log in and hit Make a Zap! in the upper right. Zapier will ask you first for a trigger — set it to Schedule by Zapier. You can pick any cadence to buy on — daily, weekly, monthly, even hourly.
Step 2: Format your Market Data
To dollar-cost average, we need to pull in the price of the crypto you want to average in to. We’ll use the Cryptowatch REST API to pull this data. Create a second step in your Zap and choose the Webhooks by Zapier app. For Action Event, choose GET.
Hit Continue, and you’ll see a form to set up your Webhook. We need to pull the market price for the coin you want to average in to from the Cryptowatch API. Put together a URL like the one below, just by changing the bolded exchange and pair to the one you want to average in to. Don’t forget to choose the right base and quote currency. For this example we’re using USD to average in to BTC on Kraken.
https://api.cryptowat.ch/markets/kraken/btcusd/price
Drop your URL in to the URL field of the GET Webhook form, and hit Continue at the bottom of the form.
Hit the + sign below the GET Action you just set up, and select the Formatter Helper action. The Action Event should be Numbers. Hit Continue. the Transform should be Perform Math Operation, and the Operation should be Divide. Put the dollar (or euro, bitcoin, etc) amount you want to spend to buy your crypto of choice every day/week/month in the Input box — I have $500 here. Hit the + on the right to give you another input box, then hit the lines with the plus sign on that box, expand GET, and select the Result Price. Hit Continue.
Step 3: Set up Cryptowatch Order Action
Visit this page to set up the Cryptowatch Zapier Action. Add a step to the Zap you’re building, and search for then select the Cryptowatch app. Select Create Order as the action and hit Continue. Connect your Cryptowatch account by creating a set of keys in API Access in your account settings then entering them in to Zapier. Hit Continue to set up your order.
On the order ticket, fill out the Exchange you want to set your recurring buys to execute on, the Market, the Type (Market will work here), and the Side (Buy for dollar-cost averaging). For Amount, hit the button on the right side of the text box, expand Numbers, and choose Output. This is the current amount of crypto you’d buy if you executed your dollar-cost average order right now.
Hit Continue and test it if you want. A test will submit an actual order to your exchange, so test a small amount by changing the first Input value in Step 2. If you get an error, you may have to change your values and “re-test” some of the steps to run a successful test of the order submission. When you’re ready, set your Zap to run.
If you found this useful, we’d appreciate a share so we can all #stacksats (or weis, or shares, or #JustinSuns, or whatever your flavor is).
BONUS: Automating Trading with Zapier
Zapier has 1,500+ apps you can use to trigger orders on any of the 7 exchanges supported through Cryptowatch, and it would take us until Ripple becomes the standard to explain all the ways you can trigger orders with Zapier. Here are a few workflows you can set up:
- Catch all those “partnership” bumps by buying when a specific Twitter account tweets with #partnership and gets over 100 retweets. Just combine the Twitter, Filter, and Cryptowatch Zapier apps.
- Buy bitcoin when the New York Times declares Bitcoin is dead for the umpteenth time. Just combine the New York Times, Filter, and Cryptowatch Zapier apps.
- Programmatically trade off a custom indicator you build in Google Sheets with the data provided by the Cryptofinance.ai plugin, which is now a part of Cryptowatch! Just combine the Google Sheets, Filter, and Cryptowatch Zapier apps.
