It’s imperative for the crypto-market analysts to have access to all sorts of cryptocurrency historical data. However, because the majority of the crypto-exchanges limit the extraction of the former, one has to wait until the real-time data pumps up inevitably. If lacking time for so, it is perfectly convenient to analyze the information that can be withdrawn from the archives.
First of all, the information helps with the data analysis—by knowing the market’s dynamics, it’s much easier to predict its behavior in the nearby future. Secondly, the data can assist with training the trade algorithms—it’s possible to train and test the artificial intelligence systems, thus further applying them to the algorithmic trading. Finally, the withdrawn information can be used for checking out the trading strategies. If you have severe plans in regards to the crypto-investments, you surely better test them out with the help of historical evidence.
Before starting to delve into the crypto-exchanges, it’s vital to comprehend some basic operating principles of the industry. For instance, it’s clear that some of the sites use the DDoS protection systems such as Cloudflare. To this end, it’s better to double-check that the platform isn’t blocking your country’s IP to be sure that there wouldn’t be any inconveniences when accessing the REST API’s of the particular crypto-exchange. Because the CAPTCHA would keep popping up, you would be forced to use VPN or Proxy Servers to secure the flawless working experience.
At the same time, it’s worthwhile knowing that some of the platforms can continuously change their endpoints, which is why there is an apparent need to keep examining the official documentation. Furthermore, one needs to realize that the platforms allow for downloading the transaction history and so-called candles. However, not a single crypto-exchange gives a chance for extracting the orders books as their record is only available in real-time.
Finally, it’s essential to check the names of the currency pairs on the different sites as they could mess up some things in a significant way. In some cases, the names of the currencies can be displayed in various formats when accessing API, only reinforcing the previous claim.
Every single crypto-exchange platform has its features that require a particular approach when working with it as can be seen below (the article published on 01.06.2018 and reflects a market on such a date).
Currently, Binance, a platform registered in Hong Kong, is one of the most popular and in-demand crypto-exchanges in the world. In fact, such a status can be justified by solely looking at the customer count and the capitalization of the market. Such numbers are undoubtedly impressive, especially if considering that Binance functions less than a single year. Because of such prominence, it is reasonable to believe that Binance would inevitably remain the industry’s leader for a long time.
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The crypto-exchange platform HitBTC allows for more than 300 crypto-pairs trade. Created by the Estonian and Israeli entrepreneurs, HitBTC became a major site where Bitcoin(BTC) and Bitcoin Cash(BCH) are traded on the constant basis.
Pros & Cons:
Bithumb is the most popular crypto-exchange platform in South Korea and is one of the largest ones in the world in terms of the trading volume. According to Korea Herald, Bithumb accounts for 75,7% of the overall Bitcoin (BTC) trade in South Korea and 50% of Ethereum (ETH). To this end, it’s no surprise that the platform forms pairs in a matter that follows cryptocurrency - South Korean won. Even though Bithumb is massive in scale, it’s quite difficult to find any information regarding the executives and members of the board as can be seen on Bloomberg. The only thing known of Bithumb is that it belongs to BTC Korea.com Co. LTD and is based in Seoul.
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The crypto-exchange platform Kraken was opened way back in 2011 in San Francisco. Kraken was the first of its kind and lead the industry: the platform’s trades and volumes started to appear on Bloomberg, and passed the cryptographically verified audit of reserves. Not only does the Kraken trade cryptocurrencies, but also operate with the American and Canadian Dollars, British Pounds, as well as with Japanese Yens. Kraken is the owner of the cryptowatch service, the one that allows for extracting data in the real-time mode. Yet, the platform doesn’t allow for direct obtaining of the cryptocurrency historical data, which is disappointing.
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Gate.io is a cryptocurrency exchange platform that provides trading access to a vast array of digital coins. Available both in Chinese and English, Gate.io started way back in 2017 and seems to be functioning outside of the US. The platform offers pretty competitive fees and is not available for all the investors: Gate.io only supports blockchain transfers in the cryptocurrencies that are currently traded on the platform. The majority of the trades take place in the form of BTC, ETH, EOS, BTM, USDT, ONT and is worth approximately $120M daily.
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bitFlyer is the major Japanese trading platform that was created back in 2014. The exchange has its headquarters in Tokyo and is lead by CEO Yuzo Kanzo and CTO Takafumi Komiyama. bitFlyer did undergo some investment rounds while gathering funds for the project: by attracting more than $35 million dollars in total, bitFlyer was able to open the office in San Francisco and obtain a legal allowance to conduct trade in 35 US States. Simultaneously, bitFlyer partnered with Vandle Card, which allowed the platform to release its own Visa Cards: not only did it allow for depositing from various sources but also for having access to various trades. To manage funds, the mobile app called bitFlyer Waller was created, which is pretty convenient to all of the owners.
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Japan is well known for its fast-growing cryptocurrency market. Bitbank, in turn, is another major player in such a league that aims to capitalize on the country’s existing love of both electronic payments and shopping in the physical stores. Bitbank posits itself as the first online bitcoin payment system in Japan and now includes a wallet service for the local payments. Even though there isn’t a multitude of currencies traded on Bitbank, it still has an influence on the market, particularly in Japan.
Pros & Cons:
Poloniex is one of the most massive crypto-exchanges in the world. It is responsible for the biggest volumes of trades for the majority of altcoins that can be exchanged for Bitcoin. Created by Tristan D’Agosta way back in 2014, Poloniex still keeps the anonymity of most of its workers, partially because the digital coins are still in the sector of the informal economy (Poloniex doesn’t have a trading license in the United States). Poloniex at first was focused on the American market, but later on was able to gather the altcoin-traders from all across the globe. The service is fully functioning now and only keeps functioning further with the daily trading volumes being close to $989 million. It goes without saying, Poloniex or Polo is one of the most prominent altcoin-concentrated crypto-exchanges, for which it is valued by the altcoin traders globally.
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In its nurture, CCXT is a JavaScript / Python / PHP library for cryptocurrency trading and e-commerce with support for many bitcoin/ether/altcoin exchange markets and merchant APIs. It is exploited to connect and trade with all sorts of cryptocurrency, both BTC and altcoins, and payment processing services globally. By providing a quick access to market data for storage, a comprehensive analysis, visualization, indicator development, algorithmic trading, strategy backtesting, bot programming, webshop integration and related software engineering, CCXT surely proved to be useful. A library aims to unify the responses from every single crypto-exchange, although one should still double-check the outcome as it’s not always performed in a correct manner.
As a whole, CCXT allows for avoiding the endpoints of crypto-exchanges, but one has to still know and understand the documentation to download the data correctly. Currently, CCXT supports REST API, but the creators plan to include WebSockets API in the nearby future.
It’s worth noting that the listed crypto-exchanges are stable in their nature and can tolerate a considerably large number of requests. However, such features don’t apply to all of them. The extraction of massive amounts of cryptocurrency historical data from crypto-exchanges is quite a painstaking and lengthy job that includes a lot of complexities that you may encounter. In this article, we shared our experience and did our best to ease that overwhelming process for you.