I've been in crypto since before it was cool to have opinions about it.
For years I watched signal channels on Twitter and Discord broadcast trades after the professional bots had already caught them. By the time a "call" hit my feed, the opportunity was gone. Somewhere in there I asked myself the obvious question: what if I built something that got the signal first, instead of reading about it secondhand?
The Build
Saturday night in April. Instead of scrolling another signal channel, I opened my laptop and started sketching Agent 1: a pool watcher for Aerodrome Finance on Base.
First problem, immediately: The Graph API I planned to use had just gone paid-only. Pivoted to DeFiLlama instead. By 2am, Agent 1 was live — scanning 229 Aerodrome pools in real time, flagging 62 as HOT and 42 as WATCH based on yield and volume.
That one agent turned into seven:
- Pool Watcher — scans pools, flags opportunities
- Yield Hunter — ranks pools by risk-adjusted APY
- Gap Calculator — coming in the next post
- Trade Coordinator — decides what actually gets acted on
- Plus a signal bus, alerting, and a paper-trading execution engine
All seven run 24/7 on an $80 Raspberry Pi 5. Not a $50,000 rig — a Pi sitting in my apartment in Atlanta.
The Numbers (So Far)
Six weeks after that Saturday night, paper trading went live with a $1,000 simulated bankroll.
Day 1: +$3.25 on 5 positions, 4 of 5 profitable.
Small number. But it's real proof the pipeline works end to end — signal detection, scoring, coordination, and execution, without a human in the loop.
The Honest Part
I'm not a career software engineer. 25 years in IT infrastructure, about a year of teaching myself Python and Linux seriously. "Always learning, never building" was the trap I was stuck in for a long time. This project was the fix — and it's still very much a work in progress, running on paper money, not real capital yet.
What's Next
This post is the concept and architecture. The next few posts in this series go agent-by-agent with the actual code: how the gap calculator scores opportunities, how the coordinator decides what to trade, how the signal bus ties it all together, and eventually — real money results, not paper.
If you're building something similar or have opinions on the architecture, I'd genuinely like to hear them in the comments.
Whatever you're building today, keep going. 🚀
— Voytek
