Introduction
Market making can be a very profitable and rewarding enterprise.. For the uninitiated, market makers provide liquidity by placing limit orders on both sides of the books anticipating to earn a small profit thanks to the spread (or difference of the bid and ask) on any given trade. On the Bitshares DEX, while all markets could use more liquidity (which is provided by such market makers), there are also many dead or illiquid markets. This not only presents a problem for traders and businesses wanting to place large orders, on the DEX but presents a massive financial opportunity for people to become market makers.

At the moment it appears the DEX already has a few major market makers using their own private software. There are also a few open source projects on GitHub in mostly bare-bones, unfinished states. One project on GitHub, created by a long standing member of the community, is no longer available. This project was called BTSBots. It worked, was freely available to everyone and there was an Android app. This trading bot was not in a finished form, nor was it easy to use, in part due to the language barrier with the developer, many people still made a lot of money and helped add  liquidity to our markets before it went offline.

The importance of BTSBots to the Bitshares ecosystem is demonstrated by the sharp drop in “Daily Orders Created”, a measure of liquidity, by over 85% to a recent low of just ~53k in the course of just 2-3 days (right after public BTSBots access was revoked).

Revision, 12/16: “aperson” has has forked BTSBots and launched “Bitsharesbot” to the public. Limit orders measure has since slowly started to recover.

Link: https://steemit.com/bitsharesbot/@aperson/bitsharesbot-is-now-stable-reduced-fee-and-public-price-feed-available-tonight-feed

This damaging event has caused the BTS community to spring to action to build a more suitable, open-source, “official” baseline for community use moving forward. Even before now, several  community members got together and created a Telegram group with the purpose of discussing market making strategies and methodologies to profit while improving  liquidity on the DEX. We have discussed advanced theoretical strategies, written guides, helped people set up bots, and taught various manual staggered orders approaches. In doing so, we have built the foundation of a very diverse community of journeymen to highly advanced market makers. There are now over 100 people in our room, now without  their main weapon (BTSbots).

It is our belief that Bitshares markets should be different to markets of the past in which just a handful of market operators  pull the strings behind the curtain. We want to provide the tools for everyone to become a market maker - whether a basic one or with the freedom to progress beyond using the framework we’ve developed. The more market makers we have the greater the competition for profits, lowering costs for users.

We have been in contact with Bitspark and they have advised us of their plans to provide bots as well. We don’t want to be stepping on each others toes but rather work together in order to provide as much liquidity as possible. Since the loss of BTSBots and speaking to Bitspark, we now believe our first goal is to provide a replacement or alternative (if it ever comes back online) to BTSBots. The new bot will be far more user friendly and free for everyone to install and use on their own computers.

This Worker will implement several strategies, one by one, with user-friendly interfaces. BitShares will provide the community these tools, free of charge, in order to keep its markets liquid, competitive, and far more transparent than it’s centralised competitors.

The Goals
The BitShares community will have the necessary tools to provide liquid markets in a decentralised way, without the any single point of failure. The software provided will have all the necessary strategies for providing liquidity and real-world prices, and all possible strategies that add actual value to the markets in the DEX. These are mostly market making strategies.

Details of such are further detailed in our supporting document: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hOPhow3WBwQmeNkL0JrIufvfE2TvsORD1OK0Xg3JnVg/edit#

The necessary elements to providing liquid markets are immediate liquidity, market depth, and prices close to those of other exchanges. There are a several different strategies that can be used to reach these objectives. The exact strategies to be implemented first are the ones we identify as lowest hanging fruit. We will make the decisions transparently throughout development, utilizing community input.

The provided open source software will function as a good basis for developing custom solutions and custom strategies. For example, remittance services can customize the software to meet their specific needs, and provide it as a user friendly package to their communities. The creators of User Issued MPA’s can customize the software to support their own markets. Thus, this Worker will support many future efforts to provide value to the ecosystem.

The specific strategies with details will be discussed elsewhere, such as in the above link, and we will discuss them openly with the community before and during implementation. The most up-to-date information will be in the Telegram Chat (see below). This document is an overview of the proposal.

Developers
In practice, the Worker will be a community escrow which aims to allocate the funds to maximize the value provided to the community as a whole. We have secured developers for the job, but will also pay bounties to freelancers and possibly acquire more developers to speed up development.

The developers are employed by the software company Codaone Oy, registered in Finland.

Mika Koivistoinen as main developer.
Vesa Toivonen as Designer
Juhani Haapala as Python developer.

BitShares representatives
Marko Paasila. Bitshares proponent since 2014. Experience in product development, project management and cryptocurrencies. I will communicate the community's needs and priorities to the developers and ensure good quality.
StatDude - Bitshares enthusiast, experienced market maker, trading bot architect.

Schedule
The worker will begin on Monday 2018-01-01 and end on 2018-12-30. The Worker can be terminated earlier by the community. The coders will begin work as soon as possible during the beginning of January. The development speed will be up to the team. Funds in escrow will be released at each completed milestone. Development will be done in 2 week sprints, with release on monday’s for ensuring better response time and support. Each new feature will be tested and made user friendly before proceeding to the next one.

A target list of features and milestones will be provided and mapped to progress on our living Strategy document.

The initial roadmap is:
Milestone 1: Basic/Relative orders bot with GUI, user defined price and spread, and a simple interface. Installable package. (Single pair)
Milestone 2 Staggered orders bot supporting multiple market pairs (Management page - multiple pairs)
Milestone 3: Manage several bot instances (accounts) within the same interface (Management page - multiple accounts)
Milestone 4: Reporting, full trade history export / Performance monitoring graphs
Milestone 5: Streamline bot creation, funding, cloning and deletion
Milestone 6: Support use and custom weighting of feeds to DEX from some other exchange
Milestone 7: Addition of social features (chat / leaderboards)
Milestone 8 and forward. More features based on community input.

The schedule and priorities will be adjusted constantly based on realities and community input.

Payment
We ask for a daily budget of $660. Since the payment is in BTS, we ask for 6600 BTS per day, which should suffice even if the BTS price temporarily falls to $0.10. The BTS will be sold for BitUSD at market price. At the end of Worker period, all excess funds will be returned to the treasury.

The received funds will be held in escrow in a 3 of 5 multisig account controlled by @MarkoPaasila, @cryptokong, @Permie, @Kimchiking, and @Cryptick The escrow will exchange the funds to bitUSD and return all excess BTS to the pool, as explained in http://www.bitshares.foundation/worker/ (Under Escrow Worker Model).

Payments will be made on successful milestones. Development costs can only be estimated beforehand, but the developer takes the risk. The escrow multisig is responsible for evaluating the quality of the released software. All payments will be made public and accounted for transparently.

Miscellaneous
The software will be provided under the MIT-licence, just like bitshares-core and bitshares-ui.

There will be a website to represent the software with introductions to different strategies and guides for getting started.

We will provide weekly updates on the progress.

The key metric to follow is either liquidity or market depth. We will design a suitable KPI and update it weekly.

Because the software is funded by the community, it will not contain strategies that don’t add value to the whole. These are Technical Analysis Trading strategies and any other strategies that reduce liquidity without increasing it somewhere else.

Contacts
Project Coordination:    Marko Paasila (@MarkoPaasila)
Telegram Rooms:          https://t.me/BTSLiquidityBotWorkerProposal
                                                     https://t.me/DEXLIQUIDITYBTS
Reports and Information:    MarkoPaasila[/member]/]https://steemit.com/@MarkoPaasila/
               


Appendix

Pays for Itself
A trading bot has the ability to greatly increase the number of transactions that take place. Current analysis indicates that about 80% of trading is already from bots. These heavy traders only represent 20% of the total traders. With a basic bot that can trade day and night even while investors sleep, it is not unrealistic to see a huge spike in activity. This activity will bring in more trading revenues. There will be more lifetime memberships, more transaction fees generated and more market makers holding assets such as bitUSD, open.btc or bridge.btc benefiting our gateways too.

A Bot for the Common Investors
Highly advanced bot development may be an area for specialized traders, however building a basic bot is about creating the tools and environment that can allow every single member of the community a way to participate, control risk and position themselves for success. This gives them a way to increase participation in the markets and the community by helping to reduce risk and cost to others. Communities often spend public money in building roads, railroads and airports. A basic bot,providing liquidity, is akin to this infrastructure so development funded by the communal funds is warranted. A simple interface that allows every person tools to automate basic strategies is the first goal. All bitshares participants will benefit from a trading bot whether they use it directly via trading or indirectly through greater liquidity.

Market Makers Community
We have already started building our base and anyone is free to join, there is so much potential here already waiting to pump liquidity into our markets, we just need the tools. We already have guides on how to add liquidity by means of manual trading but to contribute meaningfully that would be very time consuming.

Our vision is to have a thriving community of market makers spread all over the world, of all different sizes, using the tools provided to them by the community. With the more knowledgeable, experienced market makers helping the new guys get started. Good market makers could be given access to manage other people's accounts, earning from the transaction fees created by the bots if they referred them. This opens up a whole new revenue stream that many will have not even considered. A mentor and apprentice scheme where the better your apprentice is the more transaction fees you will benefit from over time.

We expect people will work together in teams to provide liquidity to their favourite coins and that this will get quite competitive in the beginning as the usual crypto tribalism sets in. This will result in other crypto communities depositing their coins on our gateways and borrowing assets such as bitUSD to make the market.

We imagine people not only creating their own tokens but having the tools available to create the required liquidity in order for people to instantly trade it too. You could have a fully functioning market up and running very quickly for an asset you had created providing you had the tools and funds to do so.

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EDIT: There is a duplicate of the Worker Proposal. Please vote for the one with "($660/d)":

DEXBot - User Friendly BitShares Market Making Bots ($660/d)

Please remove your votes from this one:

DEXBot - User Friendly BitShares Market Making Software

Four huge benefits of reddit:

• Threads. Good threads float to the top and vice-versa. Personal attacks and stupid arguments usually form their own branches, which are easy to downvote and omit
• Voting. How dumb is it to write a new post containing duplicate information (quotes) and giving a 
• More publicity. There are lots of people who will never find out about bitsharestalk. Cross-posting could increase visibility
• Superior mobile experience. SMF is crap on mobile screens

The first 3 would help reduce the appearance of negativity of the community and also reduce the impact of negative people and personal attacks. Also keeping up to date would be much more enjoyable with hot topics, new, rising and top.

There must be something better with SMF that I don't know plus I don't expect most people to care. Just opening my mouth...
And thanks to @bitsapphire for hosting the forum.

I just bumped into a challenge on innocentive for something that could be done on bitshares. They require only a written theoretical proposal. Here's the brief:

Challenge Overview

Coupons have been used as a marketing tool for more than a century. With the advent of mobile devices, manufacturers can now offer consumers a different way to access coupons besides clipping or printing them. In theory, mobile coupons are easy to access and manage, however in practice, they are not always simple to redeem, both for the consumer and the retailer. Mobile coupons can be delivered in a variety of ways (e.g. email, SMS, application). Following receipt of the coupon, the consumer must then redeem it at a retail location. This can involve a visual inspection, scanning a barcode, or linking to a Point-of-Sale device. For direct brand to consumer mobile coupons, there is currently no way to validate or expire a mobile coupon at the point of purchase, so retailers are hesitant to accept them due to concerns about reimbursement. Therefore, the Seeker (a large manufacturer of consumer packaged goods) is looking for solutions that will decrease fraud, while being easily implemented by the retailer.

Submissions to this Challenge must be received by 11:59 PM (US Eastern Time) on March 11, 2016. Late submissions will not be considered.

This is a Theoretical Challenge that requires only a written proposal to be submitted. The Challenge award will be contingent upon theoretical evaluation of the proposal by the Seeker.

To receive an award, Solvers will not be required to transfer their exclusive IP rights to the Seeker. Instead, Solvers will grant to the Seeker a non-exclusive license to practice their solutions as further described in the Terms of Use.

The challenge is here:
https://www.innocentive.com/ar/challenge/9933651

• Borrowing EUR is the right / only way to create EUR, is it?
• Suppose I borrow EUR. If I provide liquidity, I must place a sell order for less than I just "payed"? At least looking at the chart it seems so to me.
• If I sell the EUR I just borrowed into existence, it is still backed by my previous collateral, and I still have the risk of a margin call?
• If BTS goes down, I risk getting margin called because of holding EUR, in which case I pay a price for taking a risk?
• If BTS goes up, I miss the train because of providing liquidity?

So what's my incentive? How can I provide liquidity while minimizing my risk? Even better, can I make profit by providing liquidity?
I'm a small guy with only 200€ to play with, but it might be better than nothing. Maybe some bigger guys could help out too if they understood better, so please help me understand in layman terms.