Hummingbot Connector v6.1.6

Release Date: August 28, 2026 Tags: CONNECTOR, PAPER-TRADING, SIMULATION, STRATEGIES, INSTANCES

Overview

A paper-trading release. A strategy can now be run against your exchange's real order book with simulated money — the same spreads, the same ladder, the same refresh interval — without one order reaching the matching engine or one wallet being debited.

This is Hummingbot's own simulator, which is what makes the result worth having: the book, the prices and the depth are your market's, and only the money is imaginary. A paper run is therefore evidence about your own liquidity in a way a backtest is not. It is not a profit forecast — the simulator does not model the impact of the orders it pretends to place, so a tight ladder always looks better on paper than it trades. Read a run for behaviour, not for the number at the bottom.

Switching a supervised bot to paper adds two columns to one table on the next restart. Read Upgrade Notes before you update. Requires Core v6.7.2.

Update Instructions

pnpm updator

Restart the backend when the update completes.

Upgrade Notes

The instance table gains two columns on the first restart

Paper mode is stored per instance rather than per strategy, so hb_instance carries two new columns: whether the bot is a rehearsal, and the simulated balances it starts with.

• Nothing to run by hand. The backend adds both columns on its first start after the update, and both are optional with safe defaults, so every existing instance keeps running live exactly as before. There is no seeder and no migration step.
• Take your usual pre-update database backup. This is an additive change to one table, but it is still a schema change on a live install.

Added

Rehearse a supervised bot against the real book

Edit an instance on Bot Instances and switch on Paper trading. It takes effect at the next start, like every other setting on that form.

Hummingbot spells paper mode as a connector suffix, and resolves it into a simulated exchange wrapped around the real connector's order-book tracker. So the bot genuinely reads your market and simply never sends it an order.

• Added a paper-trading switch on the instance form. The card then carries a Paper badge and the bot console a paper — no live orders chip, because a healthy rehearsal and a live bot that has failed to quote look identical from outside: process up, status RUNNING, and nothing on the book.
• Added the two things the simulator needs, done for you before the bot starts. Your Hummingbot client config gains the venue and starting balances for that market, and the connector credentials are still written as they are for a live bot — the simulated connector borrows the live one's settings, including the REST base URL its order-book reader dials, so without them the book never arrives.
• Added optional starting balances per instance. Left blank, both sides of the market are funded from the strategy's own quote amount and the current mid price; a market maker re-quotes continuously, so a seed sized to the notional alone runs out within minutes and reads as a strategy fault. Set them to rehearse a specific inventory — starting flat, or short of quote.

Your client config is edited in place rather than rewritten: only the paper-trading block changes, and it merges, so a second paper instance on the same checkout cannot un-fund the first one's market and a balance you set by hand survives.

Download a paper copy of any strategy preset

Customers running Hummingbot on their own machines get the same thing from Strategy presets, and so does the admin Studio.

• Added a paper-trade switch that governs both Preview and Download, so what a customer reads is what they get. The paper copy is served under its own filename, because both files are saved into conf/controllers/ and started by name — sharing one would mean the last download silently decided what ran.
• Added two instructions in the generated file's own header, for the steps we cannot perform in somebody else's install: the connector must already be connected, and their client config must fund the market. Hummingbot's stock paper balances cover a handful of majors, so a customer rehearsing on your own listed token would otherwise start with zero of the base asset — the sell side never quotes, and it reads as a broken strategy rather than an unfunded simulator.

What a rehearsal will not do

Two limits are refused rather than allowed to fail later, and both are worth knowing before you plan around them.

Paper trading is spot only. Hummingbot's simulator is a spot exchange with no positions, no leverage and no position mode, so a perpetual profile raises inside the executor on its first quote. That is refused while the instance form is still open, and again at start if the preset is switched to perpetual afterwards.

A cross-exchange strategy simulates both legs. Simulating only the maker would mean every imaginary fill fired a real hedge, in real size, on your own account at the other venue, covering trades that never happened, for as long as the bot ran. If what you want is a live maker with a simulated hedge — proving your side quotes correctly before committing capital elsewhere — that is configured on the preset itself by naming the other venue's paper connector, and it is unchanged.

Changed

A paper bot no longer sweeps the book when it stops

When a supervised bot exits, the platform cancels whatever it left resting, because a dead market maker's quotes are worse than no market maker. That sweep is account-wide for the market: when it cannot tell the bot's own orders apart from hand-placed ones it deliberately cancels everything, on the grounds that over-cancelling beats stranding live quotes.

A paper bot places nothing, so every order that sweep could reach belongs to somebody else — your own orders, or another bot on the same account. Stopping a rehearsal would have cancelled live work.

• Changed the exit sweep is skipped for paper instances. Live instances are untouched and still sweep exactly as before.

The bot console shows nothing for a paper instance

The live-trading console reports your exchange's orders, fills and resting quotes. A paper bot has none of those, so the console is correctly empty for one — which is why the instance now labels itself there. Its log is where a rehearsal reports what it did, and it opens with the mode and the exact simulated balances the run started with.

• Changed an instance in paper mode is labelled on the instance card and in the console header.