The AI trading agent with a wallet.
Researches, debates, backtests, paper-trades and live-trades autonomously. Every decision is a multi-persona debate. Every fill has an on-chain x402 USDC receipt. Fund the wallet. Set a budget. Walk away — and come back to a book.
Franklin Trading is a fork of Franklin — the general-purpose Autonomous Economic Agent — specialized as a wallet-native trading agent. It inherits Franklin's economic substrate (x402 micropayments, USDC settlement, learned-weight model router across 55+ models, removable-by-design harness components) and adds a multi-role persona debate, a unified Backtest → Paper → Live strategy lifecycle, multi-venue on-chain execution, and four moat layers nobody else ships.
The open-source trading-agent landscape splits into halves nobody has joined:
| Project | Strength | What it can't do |
|---|---|---|
| TradingAgents (78.8k★) | Multi-role agent debate, academic rigor | No live execution; 0% prompt-cache hit rate (#750); ticker hallucination (#814) |
| AI-Trader (18.5k★) | Federated agents, Polymarket live data, copy-trading | Stale price data (#188); position-averaging bug (#186); no published backtests (#207) |
| Vibe-Trading (8.4k★) | LLM-driven research, persistent memory, Alpha Zoo (452 factors), Shadow Account | Zero exchange connectors (#100) |
| Hummingbot (18.6k★, $34B+ volume) | 50+ CEX/DEX connectors, V2 framework, institutional-grade risk controls | No LLM brain; no narrative awareness |
Franklin Trading is the synthesis: Vibe-Trading-style natural-language research and persistent memory, TradingAgents-style hierarchical persona debate, Hummingbot-style multi-venue execution rigor — wrapped in Franklin's wallet-native economic substrate and four new moat layers (regime detection, prompt-cache optimization, slippage realism, hallucination guards).
Each is a removable harness component per ADR 0003: toggle off with an env flag when the model catches up.
| Layer | What it does | Env opt-out |
|---|---|---|
| Regime detector | Lightweight HMM on rolling vol + correlation; tags every decision; swaps Trader persona prompt between trend / chop / risk-off | FRANKLIN_NO_REGIME=1 |
| Prompt-cache optimizer | Separates static persona prompts from volatile context; targets ≥40% cache hit rate from turn 2 | FRANKLIN_NO_PROMPTCACHE=1 |
| Slippage model | Per-venue impact (linear+sqrt) calibrated from observed fills; applied consistently in backtest, paper, live | FRANKLIN_NO_SLIPPAGE=1 |
| Fact-checker | Deterministic ticker → entity resolver via on-chain registries + CoinGecko; blocks TOTDY-style hallucinations | FRANKLIN_NO_FACTCHECK=1 |
npm install -g @blockrun/franklin-trading
# Create a USDC wallet on Base (or solana)
franklin-trading setup base
# Fund it with $20+ USDC — print address with:
franklin-trading balance
# Start with a budget — Franklin Trading stops when the wallet runs dry
franklin-trading --max-spend 5
# M1 strategy-runner work is in progress; today, use the agent's paper
# trading tools from an interactive session.
franklin-trading# Research mode — natural language, multi-persona debate
> "Is the BTC perp funding rate on Hyperliquid right now wide enough
to support a 1% NAV basis trade against spot on Jupiter?"
[fundamentals-analyst] thesis + citations
[sentiment-analyst] X chatter score, drivers
[technical-analyst] funding curve, term structure
[bull-researcher] carry thesis, target P&L
[bear-researcher] margin call risk, slippage risk
[trader] action: arb-long-spot-short-perp, size 0.2
[risk-officer] ✓ approved (within $400 position cap)
[compliance-officer] ✓ approved (audit_id: a1b2c3d4)
→ Estimated round-trip cost: $0.07 (LLM) + $0.83 (gas/fees)
→ Confirm? [y/N]Every persona output, every model call, every gas fee, every fill is
written to ~/.blockrun/sessions/<uuid>.jsonl. Resume any session, search
across all of them, audit every trade.
The author-facing strategy helper is available for early artifacts, while the
franklin-trading run <strategy> command and unified backtest/paper/live runtime
are still M1 roadmap work.
// src/strategies/btc-funding-basis.strategy.ts
import { defineStrategy } from '@blockrun/franklin-trading/strategy';
export default defineStrategy({
name: 'btc-funding-basis',
universe: ['BTC-PERP@hyperliquid', 'BTC@jupiter'],
signal: async (ctx) => {
const fr = await ctx.market.fundingRate('BTC-PERP@hyperliquid');
return fr > 0.0001
? { action: 'arb-long-spot-short-perp', size: 0.2 }
: null;
},
risk: { maxNotionalUsd: 1000, maxDrawdownPct: 5, killSwitch: true },
schedule: { every: '1m' },
});Once the M1 runner lands, one artifact will run three modes:
franklin-trading run btc-funding-basis --mode backtest --from 2024-01-01
franklin-trading run btc-funding-basis --mode paper # live data, simulated fills
franklin-trading run btc-funding-basis --mode live # real on-chain orders Franklin Trading CLI / TUI / Telegram
│
Agent loop (inherited from brcc)
plan · execute · compact · evaluate · verify · polish
(each removable via FRANKLIN_NO_*)
│
┌─────────────┬───┴──────┬──────────────┐
Smart Router Brain + Session + NEW: Trading
(learned, Learnings + Cost + Harness Layers
55 models) Shadow Acct JSONL (4 moats)
│
Role personas (NEW): Analyst → Bull / Bear → Trader → Risk → Compliance
│
Strategy surface (M1): defineStrategy now; unified runner roadmap
│
Execution: Hyperliquid · Jupiter · 0x · Polymarket · Binance (read-only)
│
Economic substrate (inherited): USDC wallet on Base + Solana, x402 micropayments
See PHILOSOPHY.md for the design principles,
docs/CONVICTIONS.md for the 12 design stances
formed from analyzing 60+ open issues across the four reference projects,
and docs/adr/ for individual architecture decisions.
Franklin connects to the official Base MCP server
(https://mcp.base.org) for onchain Base actions — balances, transactions, swaps, and
x402 payments — authorized via your Base Account (OAuth, per-write approval). One command:
franklin mcp add base # browser login, then `franklin start` — tools as mcp__base__*The HTTP+OAuth transport is generic: franklin mcp add <name> --url <url> connects any
hosted MCP server that supports Dynamic Client Registration + PKCE. See
docs/base-mcp.md.
| Status | Milestone |
|---|---|
| ✅ | M0 — Fork from brcc, prune non-trading verticals, rebrand |
| 🚧 | M1 — Strategy DSL + walk-forward backtest engine |
| 🚧 | M2 — Role personas (Analyst, Bull, Bear, Trader, Risk, Compliance) wired via Task dispatch |
| 🚧 | M3 — Four moats (regime.ts, prompt-cache.ts, slippage.ts, fact-check.ts) |
| 🚧 | M4 — Connectors (read): Hyperliquid, Jupiter, 0x, Polymarket, Binance |
| 🚧 | M5 — Connectors (write) + 24h-clean paper trade |
| 🚧 | M6 — Alpha Zoo (40 factors v1) + Shadow Account (broker CSV import) |
| 🚧 | M7 — Polish, docs, demo GIF, benchmark page, v1.0.0 launch |
- Equities (IB / Alpaca / retail brokers) — v2; crypto-first proves the loop
- Options Greeks / vol-surface fitting — v2
- Hosted SaaS — never; Franklin Trading's whole point is non-custodial
- Token model / liquidity-mining rewards — v2 at earliest; institutional approach in v1
- LangGraph or any other agent-graph runtime — we use Franklin's
Tasktool dispatch - Web dashboard — v2; CLI + TUI + Telegram is sufficient for v1
- Full-orderbook market-making — Hummingbot already excels here; we differentiate on LLM-driven research + execution
See CONTRIBUTING.md. The brcc rule applies: every fix
needs a receipt (session id, log line, gateway response) showing the bug
actually happened. We don't accept "looks broken" fixes.
Apache-2.0 — see LICENSE. Inherits the upstream Franklin
license. Strategy contributions in strategies/community/ follow the same
license unless explicitly marked otherwise.
Franklin Trading stands on the shoulders of these open-source projects:
- Franklin (brcc) — wallet, x402, router, harness, plugin SDK
- TradingAgents — multi-role debate architecture
- AI-Trader — federated-agent + Polymarket integration ideas
- Vibe-Trading — Alpha Zoo, persistent research memory, Shadow Account
- Hummingbot — Executor/Controller framework, multi-venue connector abstraction, governance model
If we did our job right, this is the agent each of them wanted to be.