Whether an advanced technical trader with years of experience or someone who is just starting out, one thing is critical to successful trading strategies: data. Specifically, historical data. Regardless if one is trading equities, bonds, currencies, derivatives or crypto assets, the ability to easily and reliably access historical data is fundamental to executing trading strategy and managing a portfolio.
Investors commonly use backtesting before trading in live markets. Backtesting is the process of applying your trading hypothesis against historical data to determine how it would have performed. In order to do this, investors need data from a variety of sources over multiple time periods. Depending on the asset and the strategy, the data required could be cover multiple years, weeks, months or even simply days.
For our Historical Crypto Data API service, we began ingesting data directly from exchanges in 2018 and continued into 2019. We now support six exchanges:
2018 – Binance, Coinbase and Bitfinex
2019 – Gemini, Bitstamp, Bitmex, Kraken
It’s also critical that data offer granularity and accuracy. We know investors require the ability to slice data a number of ways. However, for some people, they simply need to know the price of Bitcoin on a specific date. This often is the case when someone is calculating potential tax obligations or simply updating their financial records.
(Our Historical Crypto Prices API service currently supports pricing data for 35 trading pairs)
For our API, since we ingest data directly from exchanges, it offers the highest accuracy. And we have built the ability to quickly filter by Year as well as Daily, Weekly or Monthly. So whether it’s an investor testing their strategy against years of data or someone simply looking up prices of a crypto asset to determine a tax bill, they can quickly find the data they need.
Sample data looking at Coinbase Daily BTCUSD prices
The last point to address is cost. We have written previously about how expensive data is on traditional exchanges. Our goal is to provide investors, developers and users with the flexibility to consume the data they want when they want it. More importantly, leveraging Lightning technology, our application allows users to only pay for the data they want. This also allows us to price data at very atomic level with individual historical data calls costing a single satoshi.
Along with custom, micro-pricing, by providing data over the Lightning Network we are able to give people the option of avoiding credit cards. That means no fees to credit card companies. There are no recurring monthly or annual fees for the data. It also means no overpaying for data you don’t want or don’t use.
And it needs to be mentioned, with no credit card fees and no account creation, there is no personally identifiable information collected and stored.
Ultimately, investors require reliable historical data to explore and test their investment strategies. But historical data can also be used by developers to build applications or individuals to manage their taxes or financial records. By providing historical crypto data prices over the Lightning Network, investors and others can now acquire the volume and type of data they need. Further, they customize it by not only what data they want, but how much they wish to pay for. Historical data on Lightning puts the control in the hands of the user.
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All of our API services, for both Cryptocurrency APIs as well as Sports APIs, are built using Lightning technology and the Lightning Network. All API services are live on Bitcoin’s mainnet. Our fully customizable data service allows customers to stream as much or as little data as they wish and pay using bitcoin.
You can connect to our Lightning node at the url:
038bdb5538a4e415c42f8fb09750729752c1a1800d321f4bb056a9f582569fbf8e@ln.suredbits.com
To learn more about how our Lightning APIs work please visit our API documentation or checkout our Websocket Playground to start exploring fully customized data feeds.
If you are a company or cryptocurrency exchange interested in learning more about how Lightning can help grow your business, contact us at [email protected].