API

List of Simple APIs for Crypto Developers

An Application Program Interface (API) consists of an API Key, an API Passphrase, and an API Secret that all together, allow the API program to communicate with another platform and in crypto that other program could be a crypto wallet, crypto exchange or other types of dApps, platforms, apps or systems. These APIs are desirable for many reasons, the obvious being to integrate or interact with services that align with the developer’s or app/dApp/platform owner’s goals -- without having to reinvent the wheel of course.

For instance, universal API can allow a developer of an app or dApp to integrate as many cryptocurrency exchanges as possible with his/her dApp, which is something nice because the developer does not need to deal with different APIs tools for each exchange, which comes with differing controls, arrangements and other variations and more time and labor is spent in dealing with many technical teams of course.

If you are a crypto trader or someone who is developing a trading app/dApp, you might want price comparisons across different crypto exchanges, etc in order to make the most out of your trades or at least help your app users to do exactly that if you are a developer. This can be accomplished via universal exchange APIs.  

Such crypto APIs that allow live price comparison also nowadays allow a user to execute trades manually or automatically on any exchange through an algorithm once the model generates a trading signal. The trade is accomplished on the particular exchange found to have lowest fees etc, and the user of a dApp using the API does not even need to create/signup multiple accounts with different crypto exchanges that are integrated via the API in question.

Although APIs are popular among hedge funds and proprietary trading firms who use algorithmic trading programs, private investors also get to use APIs provided by online brokerages and more recently by cryptocurrency exchanges, to achieve their trading goals. Today, while RESTful and WebSocket are the mostly used architectures/styles for creating APIs, some exchanges use both of these protocols. Examples of those exchanges include Bitfinex, Bitstamp, BTCC, CEX.io, CoinbasePrime, CoinbasePro, GEMIN, Iand HitBTC. Other protocols include FIXtrading protocol. 

Uses of APIs

APIs can be used for very many purposes in cryptocurrencies and blockchain industry, just as in any other industry. They can be utilized to stream index tickets and index prices for the specific cryptocurrency, for reference rate data and obtaining crypto symbols, for getting detailed information on ICOs, for helping to perform due diligence on ICOs and exchanges for instance by generating exchange reports/scores/ICO reports/scores and tokens reports. They can also be utilized for getting current and historical currency rates, tracking exchange rates, tracking metadata, and payment methods.

They are still preferred methods for accessing historical cryptocurrency data, generating chart data and currency conversions, as well as integrating Bitcoin ATM Maps.cryptex, programmable web, coinworldstry, blockchain review, bctafrica

Which API?

APIs can be simple forms to very complicated forms. To help determine which is the most appropriate cryptocurrency API for your business and client, one can make a determination based on a few factors, among them the data freshness or the frequency of updating the pricing data for each asset, the number of crypto assets covered by the API service, the number of exchanges from which the crypto API borrows data, the granularity of data which refers to inclusion or no inclusion of each individual data point such as trade – ‘Tick’ data or a snapshot of the data at certain intervals. Tick data allows for more types of analysis and is considered more accurate.

Other factors influencing the choice of API include pricing of the API -- consider that while there are many APIs to use for free, many others come at a cost and in this category, each may be priced differently based on the data limits and other factors.

Some packages may be more suitable for commercial applications than for non-commercial and individual/private application ones. Other things to check about these APIs include the number of calls allowed per month say for the free version, the endpoints or number of unique URLs that you can query from an API, for instance, the price or volume – the more the endpoints allowed the greater the variety of data a developer can access. The free version of APIs also features free endpoints. It is also imperative to confirm whether the free option allows access to historical data.

Here is a list of APIs that are being used by developers for different purposes: 

Aphelion Websocket

The Aphelion Websocket is a websocket API that allows developers to pull up to date information about order book so users of their dApps can stay up to date with the order books from exchanges, manage order book subscriptions, and access trade history and much more data.

The API allows access to Aphelion DEX smart contract and when integrated, allows a dApp user to remain in control of their funds. Through the API developer tools, applications and dApps can connect to Aphelion servers for a variety of operations such as discovering markets, obtaining ticker information and statistics, and matching orders.

Aphelion, which is a p2p trading platform for crypto DEX powered on NEO, uses own token known as APH and has a tokenized blockchain to access services on a centralized crypto exchange and trading platform.

Aphelion RPC API allows developers to develop dApps or applications that can interact with the Aphelion DEX smart contracts for depositing NEP5 tokens, Commit, Claim, Compound APH, and more.

Another API from Aphelion, Aphelion API, allows developers to interact with the Aphelion DEX smart contract to let their users discover (meaning gain more information and in-depth insights through markets data) crypto markets, obtaining ticker and 24H Stats, obtaining order books, and more.

B2C2

B2c2.com provides an API and web platform through which individual dApp/app users and institutions can buy and sell cryptocurrencies 24/7/365.

Their API provides dApp owners and developers and users of those dApps, with instant access to liquidity, which is very important in terms of scaling the business.

Binance

Binance cryptocurrency exchange, which is known for low fees, rare coin pairings and listings, reliable support, fast and easy transactions, has an open API that developers can use to make better their dApps and apps through Binance offerings.

Bitcoin ATMs

Bitcoin ATMs API and Coin ATM finder API offer access of a map of ATMs where users/customers of your dApp/app/platform/shop etc can exchange fiat currencies for Bitcoin or other blockchain assets. You can choose to stream, on your page, a full map of all crypto ATMs worldwide, or those ATMs operated by a single provider pf your interest.

Bitfinex

Bitfinex APIs allow users of dApps/apps access to all of the features of the Bitfinex platform with a long term goal of allowing developers and users to recreate the entire platform on their own.

The Hong Kong-based crypto-currency exchange trading and currency-storage platform which is also operated by iFinex Inc, allows developers to access  range of features such as trading tools and market data, through the API.

BitPay

BitPay API lets merchants and consumers accept crypto as a payment method without them having to worry about risks and price fluctuations. BitPay charges only a fee of 1% compared to credit card, which charges 3% processing fees on each transaction for crypto-to-fiat bank conversions.

It can be used to create and manage invoices, issue refunds, manage bills, retrieve real-time rates information, view merchant ledger entries, and much more.

BraveNewCoin

BraveNewCoin provides cloud-based crypto APIs that deliver fast and reliable reference for real-time and historic crypto data from more that 200 exchanges, including thousands of assets and markets. It also provides some private and public APIs to institutions and the developer community.

In addition to BNC's Crypto Asset API's that are available through their strategic partners Rakuten, RapidAPI, Quandl and Tradingview, the company provides ticker APIs.

CoinAPI

If you need data from more than a single API, you can either choose to use multiple APIs or use integration APIs for all or many crypto exchanges. A good example of those APIs is CoinAPI, which allows integrating between an app/dApp with multiple cryptocurrencies using a single API.

CoinAPI allows access to 90 exchanges and this provides access to 16,36 market data updates every second. It has 31 TB of historical market data and the outputs are delivered preferably in APIs in JSON, XML, and CSV formats.

Coinbase

Coinbase has an API which makes it easy for developers to integrate Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin, and Ethereum into both new and existing applications. The API allows developers and users of their apps/dApps to generate Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin, and Ethereum wallets and addresses; buy/sell and send/receive Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin, and Ethereum; and to securely store Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin, and Ethereum.

Further, developers are able to use the API to retrieve real-time or historical price information; receive notifications when payments arrive and accept and request Bitcoin payments as a merchant.

Other exchanges with APIs for market data include

GDAX, Bittrex, Kraken, and WAVES DEX, Bit-Z, Big, Bibox, Allcoin, AEX, bitbank.cc, bitFlyer.jp, BitForex, bithumb, BitMEX, BitsBLOCKCHAIN, Bitstamp, Bittrex, BTCBOX, BTCC, CEX.io, CoinbasePrime, CoinbasePro, Coinbene, Coincheck, COINEGG, CoinEx, COINNEST, Coinone, CoinsBank, DOBITrade, EXMO, EXX, fcce.jp, gate.io, GEMINI, GetBTC, GOPAX, HitBTC, Huobi, KORBIT, Kraken, KuCoin, Lbank, Liqui.io, Livecoin, OKEx, Poloniex, QUOINEX, RightBTC, SIMEX, UPbit, WEX.nz, Zaif.jp and ZB.

Coincap.io

CoinCap API provides real time pricing and market activity for over 1,000 cryptocurrencies. The free API by ShapeShift team provides accurate data on cryptomarkets. It works perfect for aggregating real-time prices and markets but fall short as a solution that requires accurate historical data such as backtesting portfolio strategies.

CoinGecko

Coingecko API allows developers to stream live cryptocurrency and crypto exchange data on their apps, dApps or platforms etc. The API provides access to data about pricing, tickers, exchanges, historical data, coin information, developer & community stats, events, CoinGecko Beam coins & exchanges status updates directly, and global markets. CoinGecko API helps crypto users to access information relating to live crypto prices, trading volume, and market capitalization, and it also measures community growth, open-source code development, and on-chain metrics for a complete analysis beyond technical indicators.

The API allows developers to benefit from data from more than 4,000 cryptoassets and 300 cryptoexchanges. In other words, those using the API can track data about all these cryptoassets and exchanges and get comprehensive historical data. The data is delivered in JSON format and is limited to 100 requests per minute. Besides, there are no keys required and the service is free.

Coinmarketcap professional API

Coinmarketcap provides APIs to help developers aggregate data from hundreds of exchanges and thousands of coins so that they can have their users and customers having a perfect picture of the market and what it looks like. With their Enterprise API plan, developers find up to five years of historical data to help provide full visibility of crypto markets and there is all crypto data since 2013 to use.

Coinmarketcap API helps users to access comprehensive data about past pricing of the assets, its volume, and exchange info. Thus they can use that information to stay ahead of the market and make decisions that matter to them most.

Users also gain access to most accurate data in the market, including detailed charts, and these can help virtually anyone in the industry including those building a wallet, portfolio management tool and other things.

Coinograph cryptocurrency API

Coinograph API provides raw trade data, candles, order book and ticker.

CryptoAPIs.io

Crypto APIs provides APIs that allow access to the crypto market and blockchain live and historical data.

The unified API gateway provides access to data from public blockchains, private blockchains, exchange, sand private APIs. The company provides Blockchain API as part of Blockchain as a service (Baas) and developers using the API can access multiple nodes (currently more than 10 and more coming) while sparing time to focus on building their products, driving innovation, accelerating business and reducing risks. 

Users of integrated dApps and applications will be able to browse blockchain historical data, create and check wallets, check balances, access addresses and contracts, create transactions and forward payments, carry out refund and have/demonstrate proof of ownership, optimize and manage gas fees, receive notifications about certain events, and take care control of their private keys or leave it to the company.

Cryptoquote.io

Cryptoquote.io API provides access to real-time streaming price data from the cash exchanges and liquidity providers for institutional order flow as well as a historical database, market metrics, logo API, and widgets.

Daneel

Daneel is a news curation API which developers can use to return sentiment for a cryptocurrency on their dApps or apps. Daneel calculates this sentiment by pulling data from different sources of information including Twitter, Reddit, Bitcoin talk, News and Facebook (coming soon). Developers can use APIs to retrieve market news, score, price, sentiment, and trends.

Decentraland

Decentraland API allows applications to access Decentraland Land data for contributions, districts, estates, mortgages and more types of data.

Decentraland is a decentralized VR platform based on Ethereum blockchain and which allows users to record the ownership of land and allows users to interact with the real world in 3D. With it, users are able to create, experience and monetize content and applications.

Ethfinex

Ethfinex API allows developers to connect their dApps or apps to Ethereum trading data and they can use an API key to make requests that will display JSON in return. The Ethfinex APIs mirror the format for Bitfinex APIs but with ap.ethfinex.com as the base URL instead of api.bitfinex.com. This allows seamless compatibility of Ethfinex with any apps or websites already interacting with Bitfinex APIs. It also allows the re-use of any related open source libraries from or associated with Bitfinex instead of creating new resources.

Ethfinex is a cryptocurrency trading platform. The Ethfinex Trustless API, which was updated to version 2 of the Ox protocol, allows trading of cryptocurrency tokens from any Ethereum wallet or smart contract.

Final Data API

Final Data API is a news stories API that provides developers with access to crypto news stories that are updated every hour. The API provides access to historical content that dates back to 2013 and these stories can be filtered by title, body, full text, source, publication, date, author, and tag. The API is currently in public beta.

Hybrix

Hybrix is an open-source API tool that can be used to build flexible blockchain solutions and so far supports more than 25 blockchains on which developers can build Hybrix-based tools. Hybrix provides an API that can be utilized in retrieving information from the Hybrix platform including crypto balances, cryptocurrency transaction histories, crypto address validation and much more. Such kind of data can be helpful for developers who are building multi ledger dApps and solutions for instance.

Using a command-line tool and wallet that connects to any Hybrix peer node, developers can create scripts and achieve service automation. The CLI command line wallet tool, which can integrate into a developer’s shell scripts, can be used to perform transactions, query for blockchain data and manage deterministic keys.

ICO API

The ICO API was created by Zloadr and provides information on upcoming, past and present token presales. It is one of the APIs you would want to integrate when interested in that kind of data/info. The API will return detailed information about the ICO, basic information about all ICOs filters and information about trending ICOs. You can also sort by filters, trends, profile ticker, sand many more factors.

Zloadr has another different API known as the Due Diligence API which provides due diligence scores and reports for crypto exchanges, ICOs and more. Users can also access reports on exchanges, exchange scores or scores for specific exchanges, ICOs reports, ICOs scores, Token reports, ICOs scores or scores on different ICOs, and many others.

Kaiko

Kaiko, which is a market infrastructure company created in 2014, provides users with comprehensive datasets, trade data, order books, and aggregated data (ohclv, vwap, count). Kaliko partners with funds, academics, and individual traders to make this further possible.

Kraken

U.S.-based Kraken was founded in 2011 and also operates in Japan, Canad, aand E.U. and it is the largest Bitcoin exchange in Euro volume and liquidity. Its API is used in providing Bitcoin pricing to the Bloomberg Terminal and other services.

Kryptocal Event

Kryptocal Event API provides access to all Kryptocal events and announcements and supports JSON responses. It allows users to get a list of categories, events based on a from and to date, past events lists for a given coin and more. Users can get information about upcoming events for all different coins to use in production, free of charge, with call limits at every 15 minutes.

It also provides announcements from each coin events including ICO and the data is updated daily.

Longhorn by BullPay

Longhorn by BullPay API is used to add blockchain support to an application and delivers among other things, real-time and historical transactions, summaries, and auditing data-related features. It supports 5 blockchains namely: Bitcoin, Litecoin, Ethereum, Dash, and Dogecoin). It also supports Litecoin TestNET.

Nexchange crypto exchange API

Nexchange API offers the easiest and fastest ways of exchanging crypto and other blockchain assets, whether it is individuals or corporations doing the exchanging. The exchange offers a significant amount of data.

The API also offers wallet integration but this arguably doesn't serve much of a purpose apart from allowing the exchange services to access funds.

Nomics

Nomics is a Bitcoin and crypto data API that archives, aggregates and analyzes complete crypto asset data. It is a great resource for traders, quants, and hedge fund managers who need raw trade data but it can be quite expensive for small teams and independent developers searching for an affordable data provider.

Nomics API is used by funds, family offices, enterprises, and fintech developers and it enables access to trade data across a number of crypto exchanges. Instead of integrating with multiple exchange APIs, a user can stream data using Nomics as a single data source or an aggregator for these exchanges.

Shrimpy

Shrimpy API allows users of dApps to do cryptocurrency trading, allocation of the portfolio, and collection of real-time data about market and trading activities so that they can make the right decision about trading and management of their assets.

The API also allows users to do automated re-balancing and strategy execution. In addition to this, it lets developers to build applications that integrate with different exchanges including Binance API, CoinbasePro API, Bittrex API, Kraken API, Gemini API, Poloniex API, Huobi API, KuCoin API, Bibox API, BitMart API, and HitBTC API. In other words, developers can use the tool to avoiding having to keep working hard to manage all connections to every exchange and they can instead, concentrate on actual product development.

For instance, using the API means saving them the hassle of having to deal with more than 200 separate API integrations with exchanges, which cost a lot more money, coding labor and even requires more time and prone to errors and more service downtime. Dealing with all of these exchanges means developers will have to contend with a lot of data and after collecting that data, they will need to take care of many terabytes of it, which may span thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional server costs.

Through the API, developers gain access to data about crypto accounts, crypto users, trading of assets and analytics data with JSON being the preferred response format. Users can accomplish trade execution on various exchanges through this universal exchanges API without requiring multiple signups on each exchange. It can be helpful for developers looking forward to integrating scalable exchange trading functionality into their apps/dApps.

The Universal Exchange API was built as a cloud-based solution to address several crypto developer roadblocks such as Exchange Trading Product scalability and User Management.

TheRockTrading Margin Trading

TheRockTrading Margin Trading API lets customers borrow money or sell on trades for more money than you have, also known as margin trading. That means a person can buy more cryptocurrency than they could afford with the amount of cryptocurrency they own just by borrowing more and then selling to take advantage of price changes in crypto in order to get more profits than they would have gotten by selling what they owned before borrowing.

This API is more suitable for developers or app/dApp owners building platforms and ecosystems for experienced traders who are more advisable to use margin trading. The API allows margin trading only for partial funds and currency pairs and each of those funds and pairs has different leverage level – meaning, for instance, the amount you could borrow on leverage on Bitcoin is different than the amount you would borrow on Ethereum for USD pairs for the two coins.

Totle Smart Contract

Totle smart contract API allows developers to pull token data from the Totle global network. It provides access to DEX data and with it, it is possible to compare token prices and route orders across global decentralized exchanges. Totle works as a crypto management tool and decentralized exchange aggregator.

Upbit

Upbit API users look up for assets, place orders, do a balance inquiry of coins, order (purchase, sell), and withdrawal and quotation API that confirms market value, candle, and breakdown of contract.

Wyre

Wyre API provides crypto apps and services with regulated and compliant fiat-to-crypto on-ramp and works as a solution for startups that want to integrate crypto as a payment method as an alternative to traditional payment methods.

David Kariuki

David Kariuki likes to regard himself as a freelance tech journalist who has written and writes widely about a variety of tech issues that affect our society daily, including cryptocurrencies (see cryptomorrow.com and coinpedia.org); climate change (cleanleap.com), OpenSim and virtual reality (see hypergridbusiness.com). He is currently pursuing a MSc in Environmental Management at Open University. He does write here not to offer any investment advise but with the intention of informing audience, and articles in here are of his own opinion. Anyone willing to use any opinion here as advise to invest in crypto should obviously take own responsibility and accountability of their losses (or benefits) thereof. You can reach me at [email protected] or [email protected]

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