What Is Cryptop?

There have been many interesting community projects in cryptocurrency lately. One of those projects is Cryptop, which serves as a command line-based cryptocurrency portfolio management tool. People who ever played any of the Fallout video games may recognize the layout, as the two look very similar. Cryptop is a nice little project which shows that cryptocurrency users want to help improve the overall ecosystem in their own way.

Cryptop Is a Useful Portfolio Tool

While it is true that command line interfaces have become a thing of the past, they still have a certain appeal to a lot of people. Many associate a command line interface with hacking or any other “cool” computer-related tactics. In the video game world, a command line interface is reminiscent of the Fallout games, in which players have to interface with computer terminals through a command line.

Cryptop almost looks and feels as if it came out of a Fallout game, which is what makes it so appealing — to us, at least. Users can add new currencies and update the associated values with a few commands. The tool will also list the current price of any supported currency, as well as its high and low values over the past 24 hours. Users will then need to update how many of each coin they hold to get an overview of their entire portfolio’s worth. It is all pretty intuitive, and something the geekier crowd will certainly enjoy.

The standard layout can be modified to suit each user’s needs. By default, the on-screen colors are green and black, but those can be changed to an array of different ones. If people are to use Cryptop as a command line interface, the least they should have is an option to customize the color scheme. The entire program is written in Python, making it relatively easy for anyone with coding knowledge to make some additions or changes if needed.

Users must go through some hurdles in order to install Cryptop. The GitHub repo contains instructions to install it through pip or simply from the command line using a sudo command. One will need a Linux operating system to run this tool. Once the program is booted up for the first time, two configuration files will be created. One handles colors and backgrounds, whereas the other pertains to portfolio information.

It also seems Cryptop is capable of updating price information in real time. It packs quite a bit of functionality for something that seemingly was put together in mere minutes. Despite that appearance, a lot of work has been put into this project. Once again, the resemblance between Cryptop and Fallout’s htop is uncanny. There is no reason not to like this program.

Having a completely different way to track one’s cryptocurrency portfolio is never a bad thing. Although most people prefer to have an app that does that, a command line interface can do the job just fine as well. In fact, such a throwback to an old-school interface is significant, as it shows those projects are still valid. It will be interesting to see whether the project receives future updates in the coming months.