Trade Bitcoin via FIX

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Imported from previous forum

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Hi Ryan,

Thank you for the response. I’m excited to see crypto trading mature with FIX.

Going to try to get FIX running on my computer and try this out. Probably use QuickFix or something.

Best,

Mike

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Hi Michael,

I’ve heard of Bitcoin exchanges using FIX for trading, but I haven’t looked at any specific exchange’s Rules of Engagement. There can be considerable deviation from the FIX standard, and in this case, FIX hasn’t published any guidelines yet for working with Bitcoin. So consulting the ROE documents for an exchange would be your best bet.

FX trading in FIX, at least for sovereign/fiat currencies, is fairly standardized. I’m assuming Bitcoin exchanges generally act as FX spot markets. So I would think the FIX standard representation would follow typical FX conventions like 55=BTC/USD or 55=USD/BTC. The former would be traded at a rate expressed in dollars per Bitcoin, and the latter would have a rate expressed in Bitcoins per dollar. (Assuming I didn’t get this backwards…)

Now there’s a bit of a wrinkle in that FIX uses the ISO 4217 standard for its currency codes (like USD, GBP, EUR) but no official ISO 4217 currency code exists for digital currencies like Bitcoin. Informally, I’ve seen people talk about Bitcoin as BTC as well as XBT. This is an obstacle to standardization that the Digital Currency / Blockchain WG is discussing.

FIX quantity, price, and amount fields can, according to FIX conventions, support an arbitrary number of decimal places. Each exchange may limit the precision allowed via their ROEs, define tick sizes for prices, etc.

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Hi!

First time poster here on the forum. Anyways, I have a couple of comments/questions related to using FIX to send trade details to an exchange, like Coinbase.

  1. Has anyone done this yet?

  2. Does one certify a line with these type of companies? If so, what is the logic behind each messages? For example, is tag 55 = BTC? And is the CumQty [14] or tag 32 using the 8 decimal system that crypto is based off of, etc…

Will be interesting to see if any tags will need to be added to create a standard message for the crypto niche. Tag 1 values showing public keys.

All SenderCompID’s can simply be Public API Key for that user on the exchange. Coinbase is going with this flow - I like this, standardizes everything even more.

Fun project - to get a FIX engine to run on my computer and try sending a couple of trades to Coinbase. Not sure if I’ll be able to do this…open to some help. Never got a FIX engine up and running on my personal computer.