UNICORN Binance Suite Is Fully Open Source Again
How a licensing experiment ended and why that's good news for you
A few years ago I tried to turn the UNICORN Binance Suite into a commercial product under the LUCIT brand. It didn't work out. Everything is MIT now. Here's the honest version of what happened and what it means for you.
What LUCIT was
LUCIT IT-Management GmbH was a company I built around the UNICORN Binance Suite. The idea was straightforward: offer the libraries commercially, provide professional support, and build a sustainable business around tools I had already spent years developing.
The technical side held up. The commercial side never got off the ground. Funding didn't materialize at the necessary scale, and the marketing and sales work that a commercial product requires simply didn't happen. Running an open source project solo is hard enough. Running a software company solo is a different problem entirely.
After five years I drew the obvious conclusion: the model wasn't working, and the libraries were better off free.
What this means for you
All UNICORN Binance Suite modules are MIT licensed and fully open source:
unicorn-binance-websocket-api — MIT ✓
unicorn-binance-rest-api — MIT ✓
unicorn-fy — MIT ✓
unicorn-binance-trailing-stop-loss — MIT (cleanup in progress)
No license keys. No trial periods. No "community edition" limitations. The code on GitHub is the code that runs in production.
Two things are still being cleaned up: UBTSL still carries some old LUCIT branding in places, and the Conda packages still point to the LUCIT channel. Both are being fixed as part of the current suite-wide cleanup. I'll update this post when it's done.
What's the same
The libraries work exactly as they did before. 2.8 million PyPI downloads, 388+ projects that depend on them — none of that changes. The build pipeline (GitHub Actions, cibuildwheel, 58 wheel compilations per release), the test suite, the documentation, the Telegram community — all of it continues as before.
I answer issues. I fix bugs. I make releases. That part was never about the license.
What's different going forward
I'm building this out in the open, more deliberately than before.
The AI-driven maintenance experiment is running: @oliver-zehentleitner-aigent is an AI agent that works on the codebase under my review. I'm documenting what works, what fails, and what the limits are — as it happens, on this blog.
There will be more writing. More videos. The kind of content I should have been producing all along instead of trying to run a licensing business.
If you stopped using UBS because of the LUCIT licensing uncertainty, now's a good time to come back. If you've been using it all along: nothing changes except there's more coming.
Links:
GitHub: github.com/oliver-zehentleitner
Community: t.me/unicorndevs
Oliver Zehentleitner is a Vienna-based DevSecOps engineer and the creator of the UNICORN Binance Suite — 6 open source Python libraries for automated trading on Binance.
