One of the cornerstones for any financial system is data. Everyone loves data. It tells us a story of how things were in the past. While data may never be exactly indicative of the future, it can help us make projections and show us how the future might look under various conditions. In order to construct any robust portfolio strategy, access to robust data is a must.

That is why we will discuss the best APIs in the crypto market today which provide the data which can launch you into a world of bliss. There is more data than you could ever hope to process out in the cryptocurrency market, even though it’s still an emerging space. The excess of data means reliability and precision matter more than ever. Unreliable data will just make parsing through the noise even more complex.

Each of these APIs are designed with different purposes in mind. Think of these as tools. Make sure you are using the right tool for the job when evaluating where to begin.

Kaiko

Kaiko focuses on providing a robust historical dataset which can be accessed across 50 different influential exchanges. Dating back as far as 2014, Kaiko has one of the most comprehensive sets of historical data available in the market.

Tapping into their data APIs means you will have complete access to their massive repository of data. With convenient pricing plans for licensing the data, Kaiko is a solution which exceeds the expectations of institutions and developers alike.

Pricing

Kaiko provides a number of different pricing models. One of the most interesting is a $2,500 / month charge where you can freely access all their data.

Shrimpy

Comparing Shrimpy to other data APIs is a bit difficult. Primarily starting with their core purpose of providing APIs for robust application development. They are not trying to provide custom data, creative endpoints, or arbitrary statistics. The Shrimpy developer APIs connect every major exchange into a single set of endpoints. Unifying the way developers interact with each and every exchange.

Not only does Shrimpy provide complete endpoints for collecting both real-time and historical data, but they also provide a set of trading endpoints. Placing IOC and GTC limit orders is a breeze with Shrimpy. Executing a smart order routing strategy is even easier. This truly sets Shrimpy apart as a utility. It’s not just a nice to have, but a must-have solution for anyone who is building applications on top of exchanges.

Whether you need to collect data, execute trades, get asset balances from user exchange accounts, or anything else. With this unified API, it’s possible to do these things and so much more.

In addition to the convenience, the Shrimpy APIs pride themselves on being transparent. There is no confusion when it comes to their pricing model, what features they provide, or how to get an API key. It’s all openly discussed on their developer page. Anyone can sign up for a developer API account for FREE using the link here. Once signed up, you have your key. You don’t need to email one of their team members, struggle to figure out how much you will pay, or any of the other unnecessary work that’s typical for API services. Just sign up and start collecting data within 5 minutes. Don’t pay a penny. Seriously simple stuff.

Pricing

Shrimpy’s data is free. There are no limits on the amount of data you can collect for free. It’s free.

CoinMarketCap

CoinMarketCap is a website that was historically known for it’s asset leaderboard. Essentially a place where investors could go to see the top assets in the market by market cap. As the product matured, they eventually released APIs which allow developers and investors to access their library of data.

Unfortunately, unlike most of the other resources listed here, CoinMarketCap uses aggregated data across exchanges. That means the data can be wildly inaccurate and doesn’t represent the actual order books or prices of an asset on any specific exchange. This can become problematic for developers, especially when precision is key.

Pricing

Based on our previous requests for data from CoinMarketCap, their rates were $2,500 / asset. If you wanted history for all of the assets they support, that would set you back $100,000.

CoinAPI

CoinAPI, similar to Kaiko in some ways, provides a robust global CDN which allows developers to automatically connect to the API server closest to them. The developer will then be able to access trade data from every major exchange with CoinAPI’s low latency design.

This distributed infrastructure allows real-time data streaming and robust reliability, ensuring institutions and traders have access to the most up to date pricing information across every asset and every major exchange.

Pricing

CoinAPI provides a tiered pricing model which begins at $79 / month for 1k daily requests and ramps up quickly to $599 / month for 100k daily requests.

Unfortunately, the request limits below the 100k mark don’t provide significant access. For example, using the 1k request limit plan, it would take about a full year to collect all of Binance’s raw trade data. That doesn’t include order book snapshots, OHLCV data, or anything else.

Nomics

Nomics is a crypto data API which is focused heavily on data fundamentals. The foundation for building additional resources. As such, they consider themselves the “data backbone for developers”. Which fits into their current product trajectory. The Nomics API may just have the highest frequency order book data as they promote themselves as obtaining a 100ms snapshot rate for at least some markets they support.

Nomics’ API is exceptionally positioned as a way to collect raw trade data, order book data, and exchange analytics.

Pricing

While the pricing isn’t available publicly, we believe the pricing will be at a premium since they are targeting institutional players. Expect to pay upwards of $1,000 — $5,000 per month.

Messari

Messari is an API driven company which focuses on the institutional market. Not only providing market data, but also expanding into blockchain metrics and news.

Some of the exciting endpoints that are offered by Messari include sector taxonomy, developer activity, and token distribution model. These unique perspectives that are offered by Messari help differentiate it as more than just a tool, but a way to get a complete understanding of the market. These tools can truly help investors make smarter decisions about the way they construct their portfolio.

You can find a more comprehensive list of features provided in the Messari APIs here.

Pricing

Messari does not have public pricing. However, similar to Nomics, it can be expected to be institutional-grade pricing. This could once again place them in the $1,000 — $5,000 / month range for their APIs.

Conclusions

As the market has continued to grow, data has become an increasingly valuable asset. The traders, institutions, and investors who have access to the most data will have an edge. Consumption of this data will drive the future trading strategies which dominate the crypto market and bring about new ways of investing in cryptocurrencies.

Each of these above APIs focuses on unique aspects of the data market. Make sure you are using the right tool for the job when deciding which provider to go with. Try them out to see what works best for you and don’t hesitate to ask questions! Participate in the conversation today by joining our Telegram community here.