How you can get all Cryptocurrency prices for your website or application, choose wisely !!!

Cryptocurrency is the topic of this decade

Since the humble beginnings of Bitcoin in 2010 the Cryptocurrency trend has gained quite the traction this year.

With the introduction of Ethereum and smart contracts, it became possible for everyone to have their own currency in a matter of days or even hours.

It is now easier than ever to receive payment in any of these Cryptocurrencies.

Volatility remains an issue

However all Cryptocurrencies, even Bitcoin, are still very volatile compared to traditional fiat currencies like the US Dollar or British Pound.

This is why merchants who accept Bitcoin as payment keep listing their prices in traditional currencies and cross convert the price to Bitcoin at checkout.

To accomplish this they need a reliable price API

You can get the real-time price of these cryptocurrencies from two places, we’ll explore both of them:

1. Directly from cryptocurrency exchanges

The only ways to trade cryptocurrencies are directly Peer-to-Peer or via online cryptocurrency exchanges.

Almost all cryptocurrency exchanges expose their prices via API.

All of them have REST APIs but few of them provide live prices via websocket.

These APIs are mostly used for trading and their pricing capabilities are limited.

Exchanges’ APIs are limited only to the cryptocurrencies that they provide. If you want to provide pricing from Bitcoin to all 170 world fiat currencies like the US Dollar, Euro, British Pound, Brazilian Real etc, you are out of luck.

What you must do is integrate with two services:

First with Bitcoin exchange like Bitfinex, Gdax, Bitstamp etc.

Then with a provider for exchange rates between fiat currencies.

Exchanges are often the target of attackers because they store large sums of money.

Here is a list of high profile hacks so far (August 2017).

You will not have this problem with independent price providers.

The only advantage of these API’s is that they are free.

2. Independent cryptocurrency index providers

Independent cryptocurrency index providers like BitcoinAverage make it their business to provide a reliable and up-to-date price and historical API of all major Cryptocurrencies.

Independent

These independent providers integrate prices from all major Cryptocurrency exchanges and compute a global index. For example BitcoinAverage integrates the prices from over 40 different exchanges.

Exchange agnostic

It is often the case that an exchange goes down or is somehow breached and starts outputting crazy prices. This is very easy to spot and manage when you have 40 other data points to compare it to.

Specialized

Since the cryptocurrency price api is the product of these companies, much more thought is given to it’s implementation, stability and ease of integration.

Also, as with any serious company, the product is constantly being improved and upgraded. Always on the lookout of new, promising cryptocurrencies and tokens which are getting traction.

BitcoinAverage currently supports over 100 different cryptocurrency pairs and over 170 crypto/fiat pairs.

Websocket API

This is one of our most requested features and for good reason.

Bitcoin exchanges very rarely provide real-time price feeds, their main focus is the trade data.

In contrast, our focus is the price data.

We provide two types of websocket channels:

1. Ticker: This is our live websocket api which supports multiple price streams in a single connection including but not limited to: Bitcoin, Litecoin, Ethereum, Ripple, Bitcoin Cash, Zcash and many more.

2. Exchanges: This channel provides data for our 40+ integrated cryptocurrency exchanges including: Bitstamp, Bitfinex, Gdax, Poloniex, Bittrex, Okcoin, Kraken and many more. This way you can get directly the Bitcoin/Euro (BTCEUR) price pair from Bitstamp or the Ethereum/Us dollar (ETHUSD) price pair from Kraken.

Support

The price API being a product in itself means the voices of developers are being heard and they get prompt support 24/7.