Today we are excited to announce the release of our cryptocurrency exchange market data api that is monetized with the Lightning Network. The API is currently available on Bitcoin’s test network.
- BTCUSD, BTCUSDT
- ETHUSD, ETHUSDT
- BTCETH
We are going to be offering more exchanges rapidly as well as adding more trading pairs.
If you are curious about how these APIs work please visit our API docs or watch our video series about using our API with the Lightning Network
- Creating a market data subscription
- Refilling your market data subscription
- Receiving a refund for your market data subscription if you have a balance remaining
This adds another API to our library. Other APIs that are available now are NFL and NBA sports APIs. These are pay per call APIs that are monetized with the Lightning Network. These allow you to query real time and historical information about these sport leagues.
Background
Traditionally there has been a two choices with APIs:
- Providing them for free with limits (rate-limiting) with no opportunity to monetize
- Requiring payment with a credit card and disclosure of sensitive personal information for access to the API
At Suredbits, we believe that rate-limiting will be ancient history after the Lightning Network is widely adopted. There is no point in limiting usage of your API if you can monetize it and dynamically charge fees for usage of the API.
Traditional financial market APIs — provided by the CME, CBOE, NYSE, NASDAQ etc — fall under category number 2. The data fees for connecting to the CBOE alone would cost $25,000/mo. This fee must be paid for up front every month — no matter how much data you use.
We believe that this data monetization model is horribly broken and we don’t want to see cryptocurrency exchanges make the same mistake.
With the advent of cryptocurrency and the Lightning Network, exchanges can now monetize their market data in a more efficient manner — with smaller time frames for their data subscriptions and less counter party risk. This will grow revenue for exchanges while also maintaining transparency into the cryptocurrency markets.
Lightning is also great way to boost liquidity on your exchange. It allows for faster arbitrage which will make your markets more efficient. Traders can now transfer funds in less than a second from one exchange to another. This allows for unprecedented liquidity in the cryptocurrency markets giving them to potential to be the most efficient markets on earth.
If you are an exchange and are interested in monetizing your market data, or the security considerations you need to take into account for integrating the Lightning Network into your exchange please reach out to [email protected].
What’s next for Suredbits
We are going to keep rolling out new exchanges and trading pairs weekly for our API. Soon you will see all of the exchanges with their various spot and derivative markets available on our APIs.
We also are going to continue working with exchanges to provide information and services relating to the Lightning Network.
In the next two to three months, we will release a historical data API crypto exchanges. This will allow you to “replay” intervals of market data from our historical API. For instance, you would be able to replay the last hour of market data on the BTCUSD spot market on Bitfinex and see how your trading strategy performs against this historical data.
In the next 6 months we will be rolling out a Neutrino wallet built on top of bitcoin-s that will allow individuals to be on-boarded onto the Lightning Network much faster. This will avoid the arduous process of syncing the entire blockchain before being able to open a Lightning channel.
If you’re interested in chatting more about Lightning Network technology or crypto tech in general, you can find us on Twitter @Suredbits or join our Suredbits Slack community.