3Commas, Cryptohopper and unCoded – why this Binance trading bot takes a different path
If you’ve ever googled “crypto trading bot”, you’ve almost certainly run into 3Commas and Cryptohopper. They’re big, feature-rich cloud platforms – and they absolutely have their place.
But when we at ArrowTrade started to automate our own trading, we kept running into the same pain points:
too many features, not enough focus,
cloud dashboards instead of real control,
margin and futures everywhere,
and very little attention on sane, controlled spot trading and clean micro-execution.
That’s why we built unCoded – a self-hosted Binance trading bot with a very clear mission:
Help you accumulate your favourite coins cheaper and take profits in uptrends, using thousands of small spot trades per day, while you keep full control over your capital.
This article doesn’t try to sell you on 3Commas or Cryptohopper. It simply shows how they typically work – and why unCoded deliberately does things differently.
1. Cloud platforms vs. your own engine
Both 3Commas and Cryptohopper follow the same basic architecture:
you create an account on their cloud platform,
you connect your exchanges (Binance, KuCoin, etc.) via API,
your bots live on their servers and you control everything from a web dashboard.
Your funds stay on the exchange (non-custodial), but all strategy logic, uptime and security sit on infrastructure you don’t own.
unCoded flips that around:
the bot runs on your own server (for example a small Linux server at a VPS provider),
you connect your own Binance account with API keys that cannot withdraw,
you control the bot via Telegram, but the engine itself belongs to you.
In simple terms:
3Commas / Cryptohopper = “my bots live in someone else’s cloud”
unCoded = “my bot is a machine I own – it just talks to Binance for trading”
For a lot of traders – especially those who’ve been through an exchange hack or API scare – that difference alone is a big deal.
2. Strategy philosophy: feature zoo vs. one sharp tool
3Commas and Cryptohopper are designed to be strategy supermarkets:
multiple bot types (DCA, grid, arbitrage, market-making, copy trading…),
signal marketplaces, social features, templates,
lots of menus, toggles and combinations.
That’s great if you want to experiment with a lot of different ideas and have the time (and nerves) to constantly tweak and test.
We wanted something else.
unCoded: a specialised micro-trading engine
unCoded is not “yet another general-purpose bot”. It’s a specialised Binance spot trading bot built around one core idea: Turn volatility into an advantage by breaking your trading into many tiny spot trades instead of a few big ones.
In practice, that means:
the bot places lots of small buy orders below the current price → you accumulate more of your favourite coin as the market dips;
it places multiple small sell orders above the price → you automatically skim profits when the market moves up again.
You don’t click through ten different bot types. You configure one engine:
which pair (e.g. PEPE/USDC, ETH/USDC),
how many “slices” you want to trade with,
how much per slice,
how tight or wide the steps should be.
The result is a focused tool: less “platform noise”, more clarity around a single, well-understood behaviour.
3. Risk profile: leveraged dreams vs. spot reality
There’s another important difference that often gets glossed over in marketing:
Many bots and strategies out there love to talk about leverage, margin and perpetuals. They can look fantastic in a backtest – until the market really crashes.
With margin/futures you always have one extra enemy: liquidation.
If the market moves far enough against your position, you don’t just sit on a temporary loss – your position is forcibly closed and the money is simply gone.
unCoded stays on spot – on purpose
unCoded is built for Binance Spot, not for leverage:
no margin,
no perpetuals,
no liquidation price.
Worst case scenario with unCoded:
You end up fully invested in the coin you’re trading (for example ETH) with the capital you chose to allocate.
And usually, it’s still better than a single lump-sum buy at the beginning, because:
the bot has been buying dips along the way,
it has taken partial profits on local spikes,
so your average entry price is often lower than if you had just bought everything on day one.
That’s the core difference in risk philosophy:
some bots try to impress with big leveraged screenshots,
unCoded tries to make spot volatility work for you without ever putting you in a liquidation lottery.
4. A real-world test: 3Commas DCA vs. unCoded micro-trading
One of our colleagues ran a simple side-by-side test that explains this quite nicely.
Starting capital: 1,000 USD
On 3Commas: a DCA bot with relatively safe settings
On unCoded: our high-frequency spot bot on Binance, also with conservative parameters
After about a month on 3Commas:
the DCA bot produced roughly 17–20 USD profit,
that’s about +2.4%,
and when you compare it to just buying and holding Bitcoin in that period, the difference was basically in the cent range – slightly up, but not life-changing.
Was it bad? No. The bot did its job. The portfolio wasn’t in the red. That’s already more than many manual traders can say.
In the same time window, unCoded ran just eight days (fresh version, new server setup):
in those eight days, the bot generated roughly 60 USD profit on the same 1,000 USD capital,
both bots were configured more on the “safe” side, not in degen mode.
Again: this is not a performance guarantee, markets change, and past results are not a promise. But it does illustrate the difference in approach:
a DCA bot will slowly average you into a position and smooth out volatility;
unCoded’s micro-trading engine is designed to use every little move – especially in choppy or active markets – to keep buying a bit lower and selling a bit higher.
Handling a sharp crash
In that test phase there was also a strong downward move (our colleague jokingly called it the “Trump–China crash” in the video).
unCoded used a safety setting called: “don’tBuyBelowQuoteAssetBalance”
In plain English:
you set a minimum quote balance (e.g. 500 USD),
once the bot reaches that level, it stops opening new buys,
it effectively hits the brakes during a violent dump and protects your remaining dry powder.
After the crash, you can lower the threshold and let the bot continue from a healthier baseline.
In a sales conversation, this is easy to summarise:
The bot has a built-in line in the sand: “Below this balance, we stop digging the hole deeper.”
5. Pricing logic: subscription vs. share of profits
Most big platforms, including 3Commas and Cryptohopper, use classic subscription models:
you pay per month or year,
higher tiers unlock more bots, more features, more exchanges,
on top of that, strategy marketplaces or signal providers may charge extra.
You primarily pay for access, not for results.
unCoded uses a different model:
no monthly subscription,
instead, a profit-share on realised gains:
standard share: 30%,
with certain conditions you can bring that down to 20%,
handled via Binance Pay directly inside the Telegram interface,
if your licence balance hits zero, the bot simply pauses until you top up again.
So the mental model changes from:
“I pay every month and hope my bots outperform the subscription fee”
to:
“I share a piece of what the bot actually earns for me.”
For many people on the business side, that’s an easier conversation to have.
6. So who is unCoded really for?
unCoded is not trying to be 3Commas 2.0 or Cryptohopper with a twist.
It’s built for traders who:
mostly care about Binance Spot,
like the idea of accumulating their favourite coins cheaper over time,
want to participate in volatility without playing the leverage casino,
appreciate that they can predict exactly how much capital the bot will use,
prefer a self-hosted, non-custodial setup where their trading engine is theirs, not just another cloud tab.
In other words:
If you want one sharp, specialised tool to grind out spot trades on Binance with a clear risk profile, unCoded is built for you.