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Kelp: Setup your first trading bot on the Stellar Network
Olvis Gil · EduNode · 5 min readKelp is a free, customizable, and open-source trading bot for the Stellar decentralized exchange (SDEX). Whether you are a market maker, arbitrageur, or simply want to automate your trading strategy, Kelp provides a powerful and flexible framework.
Why Use a Trading Bot?
Markets never sleep, but humans do. A trading bot can monitor price movements, execute trades, and manage your portfolio around the clock without emotional bias. For market makers on the Stellar DEX, Kelp can continuously place and update orders to provide liquidity and earn spread.
Getting Started with Kelp
Kelp is available as a pre-compiled binary for Windows, macOS, and Linux. You can download it from the official GitHub repository at github.com/stellar/kelp. Once downloaded, you configure it with a simple TOML configuration file that specifies your trading pair, strategy, and account credentials.
Available Strategies
Kelp comes with several built-in strategies: buysell (simple buy/sell spread), balanced (maintain a balanced portfolio), mirror (mirror orders from another exchange), and sell (one-sided sell orders). You can also write custom strategies using the plugin architecture.
Running Kelp
To run Kelp, simply execute the binary with your configuration file: kelp trade --botConf ./trader.cfg --strategy buysell --stratConf ./buysell.cfg. Kelp will connect to the Stellar network and start trading according to your configuration.