RLSwaps

Rocket League Swaps (rlswaps.com) was the first fully automated trade bot and marketplace in Rocket League. While the concept of trading bots in game and financial economies as a whole was not new, RLSwaps brought the idea to Rocket League's player-to-play market, bridging real-world financial automation principles with the game's virtual cosmetic ecosystem.

Much alike modern day high frequency trading (HFT) firms, RLSwaps functioned as a market maker, providing liquidity to trading in Rocket League by maintaining thousands of active buy and sell positions across every cosmetic item in the game. The bid-ask spread was dynamically adjusted using a variety of signals; real-time trading data, game news and item fundamentals.

To maintain healthy liquidity and avoid overexposure to low-value/common assets, the system incorporated inventory risk management logic. Individual items were targged with "overstock" thresholds, preventing the bot from accumulating too much of a single illiquid asset. As supply approached this limit, bids were gradually lowered then ultimately removed, reducing our exposure to underperforming items.

At its peak, RLSwaps managed the largest inventory by both asset count and total market value in the Rocket League virtual economy. This scale created natural network effcts, as collectors and traders alike knew that if an item existed, it could be found or sold to RLSwaps. Thus, the platform became a significant venue for price discovery as players quoted RLSwaps bids/asks across Discord trading groups and other similar forums.

Technologies

• TypeScript
• React
• Node.js
• Less