What is keel? A plain-English introduction

[eaitbrahim]

Imagine you want a robot to trade crypto for you. The danger with trading robots is obvious: if the robot is wrong, it loses your money fast, and most robots are confidently wrong.

Keel is my answer to that. It's a robot that trades crypto only if it can prove it deserves to.

Two things make it different:

1. It has rules it cannot break. Before any trade happens, it checks a long list of safety rules — how much it's allowed to spend per day, how much it can lose before stopping entirely, an emergency off-switch that always works, and rules from Islamic finance (since I wanted it Shariah-compliant: no interest, no speculation-heavy stuff, and it only trades assets that have been properly vetted and recorded — it never guesses).

2. It has to earn the right to trade real money. Every strategy has to pass a test regime: prove itself on historical data with real fees included, then prove itself again with fake money in real time — hundreds of logged trades — and even then it gets checked for "you just got lucky on past data." No strategy has passed yet, so today it's honestly in training mode, collecting evidence with fake money across 19 cryptocurrencies on Coinbase (the only venue it trades — spot only, no leverage, no shorting).

The name fits: a keel is the part of a ship that keeps it from flipping over. This thing exists to keep the trading from capsizing.

And the philosophy in one line: most tools try to find the perfect trade. Keel assumes it doesn't exist yet — and refuses to bet until one proves otherwise. It's open source, so anyone can check that it does what I just said.

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If you want the deeper versions: how keel works, the Shariah basis it encodes, and the announcement of the evidence pipeline.