// the find
stellar-deprecated/kelp
Kelp is a free and open-source trading bot for the Stellar DEX and 100+ centralized exchanges
Kelp is a market-making bot for the Stellar DEX and centralized exchanges, built by the Stellar Development Foundation. It's for liquidity providers, ICO issuers, and traders who want automated order placement on Stellar or bridging arbitrage to CEXs. The repo is officially deprecated (the org moved it to stellar-deprecated) with the last real activity in 2023.
The strategy architecture is genuinely well-designed — each strategy (sell, buysell, balanced, mirror, pendulum) is a clean plugin implementing a single interface, making it easy to add new ones without touching core logic. The mirror strategy with spread-based hedging is practical for anyone running cross-exchange arbitrage. CCXT integration via a REST sidecar is pragmatic — it avoids rewriting 100+ exchange clients. The balanced/pendulum AMM strategies predate the Stellar native AMM and show real understanding of constant-product market making mechanics.
Officially deprecated — the SDF moved it to the stellar-deprecated org and stopped maintaining it, so any production use means you own the bug fixes. The CCXT integration requires running a separate Docker container pinned to ccxt-rest v0.0.4 from 2019, which is abandoned and broken against most modern exchange APIs. The GUI depends on Electron via astilectron, a notoriously painful build stack, and the Windows setup involves a chain of .bat files and WSL instructions that screams 'unmaintained'. The Go module setup still uses the old Glide dependency manager alongside go.mod, signaling the codebase straddles two eras and was never fully modernized.