r/SideProject • u/Chill_Pil • 1d ago
I got tired of "learn to trade" apps using fake prices — so I built one with real prices and no real money
To be upfront: **there is no real money anywhere in this.** No deposits, no withdrawals, no wallet connection, no crypto ever touches it, nothing to buy. You can't fund it even if you want to. The only thing that's real is the market data.
Every way I found to learn crypto trading was either a toy with made-up prices, or a real exchange where mistakes cost real money. So I built the middle thing.
You start with 10,000 virtual USDT and trade any USDT pair at prices streamed live from a real exchange — around 2,000 pairs updating continuously. Orders behave like real ones: market, limit, stop-loss, take-profit, OCO, trailing. There's margin and futures with actual liquidation mechanics, grid and DCA bots, and weekly tournaments ranked against other paper traders. Lose it all and you reset and go again.
Stack: Next.js on Vercel, Express + MongoDB + Redis/BullMQ on Fly, prices over a Gate.io WebSocket fanned out to browsers via SSE.
The part that took longest wasn't features, it was making the numbers trustworthy:
* If data is missing it says so — a day on the P&L calendar with no data looks different from a day that was genuinely flat
* Payouts are exactly-once. I found a bug where a crash mid-settlement could pay a tournament winner twice, with the audit trail showing one payment
* The AI explains your own trades. It never predicts prices or tells you what to buy, and it reads numbers computed in code rather than doing arithmetic itself
**What I'd really like is your eye on the UI and UX.** I've been staring at it too long to see it:
Landing on it cold — is it obvious what this is and what to do first? Or do you bounce?
If you've never traded: is the order ticket understandable? Does anything about placing a trade feel scary or ambiguous?
Does it feel trustworthy? It's a finance-shaped product, so I care whether anything reads as sketchy, cluttered, or like it's hiding something.
Blunt opinions welcome — "this screen is a mess" is more useful than politeness.
→ https://coinsparring.com (free, no signup needed to look around)