Inspiration
We wanted to provide an interactive and intuitive way of visualizing crypto currency and block chain to a wide audience. Many visualizations and presentations of data often come off as too formal, and uninspired. It turns off many people who otherwise might have a genuine interest in understanding the data and intricacies of the market. Hence, we decided to incorporate data visualization and blockchain interaction seamlessly through Minecraft. We felt that Minecraft was an optimal choice both for its simplicity compared to other virtual reality or sandbox style games, as well as its wide reach among an audience who would benefit from the educational opportunity of intuitively learning the mechanisms driving the crypto and blockchain technologies of the future.
What it does and how we built it
We connected to the Binance API to get continuous real time data on a few crypto currencies (BTC, ETH, DOGE, HBAR). We created an algorithm that scales and prepares the data before passing it into a heatmap to see the "intensity" of trades at certain price points over time. This gives us far more insight than a simple graph would because it clusters the trading patterns in a way that is hard to notice otherwise. We also started to implement direct market trading scripts that run from within Minecraft, but did not have time to fully realize this vision. However, we are still very pleased with the quality and creativity our members put into this passion project over 24 hours.
Challenges we ran into
The time constraint was a serious issue. Working with Java sockets was extremely difficult as we used Python for most of our data processing algorithms, and we had to use Java since Minecraft is entirely based on it. Using spigot with Hedera was a nightmare, and we had to build the entire bridge between these two technologies ourselves, which took a tremendous amount of time and effort. A lot of time and effort was also spent on the correct way to present heat maps within Minecraft - there were many choices, each with their own drawbacks and benefits, as is the case for most visualizations. HBAR receives very little real time trades, so ultimately, we were also let down by how sparse the heat maps for this particular asset is, compared to the other popular options. Also, Minecraft has really poor documentation, spread across multiple threads in multiple forums and not collected coherently in one place - this really did not help!
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Actually being able to see the heatmaps move and evolve evoked great feelings of joy in us all. The first stirrings after 18 hours of continuous work nearly brought tears to many of our eyes. We are happy that despite its simplicity and currently limited functionality, the entire system is well connected and works robustly.
What we learned
We learnt how to build pipelines between real-time market data, into Python and Java, and even as far as within the world of Minecraft itself! We even started building a bridge from out of Minecraft to connect with real markets to make real trades.
What's next for CryptoCraft
We aim to make the visualizations functional, more varied and diverse as well as provide a wider range of market data for our users. We will certainly add support for more cryptocurrencies, and we are looking forward to adding more methods of visualization (specially clustering) that we feel would help draw insights from market data for our audience.
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