Ultimate Guide to The Crypto Market Data in 2025

2024 was an exciting year in cryptocurrencies, wasn't it? We witnessed some significant events, such as the halving of Bitcoin and its later crossing the incredible value of $100,000. This year also showed the vulnerability of cryptocurrency markets to political changes (here, just mention the recent victory of Donald Trump or the martial law in South Korea). Experts also point to some of the most important trends that have emerged:

• Institutional Adoption: Major financial players entered the market through Bitcoin ETFs, creating more regulated investment options. This shift helped stabilize prices compared to previous market cycles.
• Technological Innovations: Decentralized finance (DeFi), NFTs, and energy-efficient blockchains like Cardano and Stellar Lumens gained traction as the industry evolved.
• Changes in Regulations: Governments worldwide introduced clearer rules for cryptocurrency trading. Central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) showed how traditional banking systems are adopting crypto technology.

Overall, the market in 2024 demonstrated increasing maturity and mainstream acceptance. As more professional organizations invest in cryptocurrencies, they need precise historical and real-time data measured in milliseconds. Because CoinAPI specializes in providing these, we present a complete guide on what you need to know about crypto market data in 2025. No fortune telling, only facts.

Who needs crypto market data and why?

In simplest terms, many different groups of people linked to cryptocurrencies:

• Platform Developers - teams building DeFi and trading systems need both historical and current data to create useful tools for their users. The best way for them is to choose a crypto market data provider, which saves development time and lets them release a product faster.
• Financial institutions - traders require accurate, up-to-the-second prices for decisions and historical information for strategy development, backtesting, and risk assessment.
• Research companies and universities - more and more researchers are interested in the cryptocurrency market. To develop reliable reports, they need as much aggregated and analysis-ready data as possible from multiple crypto exchanges, both centralized and decentralized.
• Regulatory agencies - regulatory and public sector companies need to monitor market activities, detect irregularities, and enforce regulations across different jurisdictions.

You can read more use cases of crypto market data on our website.

Who provides the data?

You can get data directly from exchanges, which show current prices, daily changes, and market caps. Each exchange offers API access to more detailed historical information. However, if you need a vast amount of data from multiple cryptocurrency exchanges, the best (and simplest) way is to connect with a data aggregator like CoinAPI which integrates with over 350 exchanges.

Read more about how to get historical and real-time data from multiple exchanges.

What are the main types of market data?

There are a lot of data types to track. Here are some of them:

• Quotes: Real-time bid and ask prices for cryptocurrency pairs.
• Trades: Detailed information about individual transactions, including price, volume, and timestamp.
• Limit Book Snapshots: Snapshots of the current state of the order book, displaying available buy and sell orders at various price levels.
• Full Limit Order Book: A comprehensive view of all active buy and sell orders in the order book.
• OHLCV (Open, High, Low, Close, Volume): Aggregated data that summarizes the price movements and trading volume over specific time intervals.
• Index Data: Composite metrics that measure the performance of a basket of assets or specific market segments.
• Futures and Derivatives
  • Funding Rates: Data on regular funding rates applied to open positions to maintain price parity with the underlying asset.
  • Open Interest: Metrics reflecting the total number of outstanding derivative contracts.
  • Mark Price: Fair price calculations used to prevent unnecessary liquidations.
  • Liquidation Data: Information on positions that have been forcefully closed due to insufficient margin.
  • Position Data: Aggregated long/short ratios and position sizes
  • Spreads: Price differences between related instruments
  • Swaps: Interest rate and total return swap data
  • Options: Put/call ratios, strike prices, and implied volatility

How is cryptocurrency data aggregated and standardized?

Cryptocurrency data aggregation and standardization enable you to compare data between platforms. Some crypto exchanges use different names or symbols which makes it more difficult to make a thorough report or analysis. This is also particularly important for people and institutions using arbitrage trading that take advantage of small discrepancies in the prices of trading pairs on two or more exchanges.

What does the process of aggregation and standardization look like? We’ll describe it from our perspective. At CoinAPI, we conduct a comprehensive, multi-step process to ensure consistency, accuracy, and reliability across various data sources. Here's an overview of how this is achieved:

1. Data Collection

For each eligible cryptocurrency symbol, CoinAPI collects average price and volume data from multiple exchanges (over 350) in real-time or over defined intervals.

2. Symbol Grouping

Symbols are grouped based on their base and quote assets, regardless of their order in the pair. This grouping facilitates uniform aggregation across similar trading pairs.

3. Aggregation Methodology

• Volume-Weighted Average Price (VWAP): CoinAPI calculates the VWAP for each group, considering both price movements and trading liquidity over a 24-hour period.
• OHLCV Data Aggregation: Aggregated data types such as OHLCV (Open, High, Low, Close, Volume) start from a 1-second interval to ensure granularity and precision.

4. Price Conversion and Standardization

Prices are converted into reference asset units by constructing a graph of asset relationships and applying a Breadth-First Search (BFS) algorithm. This ensures that all prices are expressed consistently in terms of the reference asset.

5. Quality Control and Standardization

CoinAPI adheres to strict data selection and quality control processes, filtering out anomalies (e.g., prices beyond 3 standard deviations) and ensuring that aggregation methods are uniformly applied across all data sources.

6. Handling Data Discrepancies

Differences in how exchanges aggregate data are reconciled by CoinAPI through real-time data stream aggregation and applying consistent aggregation logic, irrespective of the source exchange's methods.

7. Data Outputs

Aggregated and standardized data is made available through various APIs and data streams, including historical APIs, real-time streams, and tick-by-tick data via Flat Files API.

By following these processes, CoinAPI ensures that the aggregated cryptocurrency data is consistent, reliable, and standardized across different markets and exchanges, providing users with a unified dataset for analysis and application.

What is the key difference between obtaining real-time and historical data?

The main difference lies in the connection type used to collect data from an exchange. The most basic type for retrieving historical data is the REST API. You define what market data you need and from what period, and then you’ll get them within 100-200 milliseconds or slightly longer due to the volume of data being processed.

For real-time data, the connection must be constant and the data is to be transmitted as fast as possible after it appears. REST API is not suitable for this purpose, so substitute it with WebSocket protocol or FIX API. WebSocket API is ideal for applications requiring continuous, real-time updates such as:

• live market data feeds,
• analytics dashboards,
• monitoring tools.

FIX API, which is more complicated to implement, enables users to deal with complex trading activities, including:

• order management,
• trading execution,
• handling trade confirmations.

Although both protocols offer low latency, FIX API's performance is highly dependent on the implementation and network infrastructure, making it suitable for high-frequency trading environments. In our opinion, in 2025 the number of institutions using FIX API will increase rapidly.

Read more about a detailed comparison between REST API, FIX API, and WebSocket.

How is crypto data typically priced and licensed?

Crypto market data providers’ pricing and licensing should be structured to accommodate various client needs, ensuring flexibility and scalability. The pricing models and licensing agreements are typically based on the following factors:

1. Data type and scope - access to comprehensive historical datasets may be priced differently compared to real-time data feeds due to the necessity to maintain different connection types.
2. Usage volume - pricing often scales with the number of API requests or the volume of data consumed. However, higher usage levels may qualify for discounted rates. Clients requiring high-frequency data updates may incur different pricing due to the increased resource allocation.
3. Licensing terms - licensing agreements define how clients can use the data, including any restrictions on redistribution, commercial use, or integration into third-party applications.
4. Duration and renewal - licenses can be structured on a monthly or annual basis, with options for automatic renewal based on client preferences.
5. Support and Service Level Agreements (SLAs) - as it is at CoinAPI, higher-tier plans may include dedicated support, faster response times, and personalized assistance. Moreover, we offer custom Service Level Agreements (SLAs) with high uptime guarantees measured by a third party for added transparency.
6. Customization and additional features - crypto data suppliers should tailor the offer to clients with unique requirements and provide them with specialized data access or integration support. Additional services such as enhanced security features, extended historical data access, or premium support packages may be available at an extra cost.

What are the challenges in managing and utilizing market data effectively?

Organizations need to overcome several challenges to ensure data accuracy, reliability, and optimal performance. Here are some of the most common pitfalls to cross:

1. High-Frequency Data Streams - crypto markets operate 24/7 with transactions occurring at an unprecedented pace. Handling the sheer volume and velocity of real-time data requires robust infrastructure and efficient data processing pipelines.
2. Scalability - as the number of users and data requests grows, systems must scale seamlessly to accommodate increased data flow without compromising performance
3. Accuracy - ensuring that the data received is accurate and free from errors is crucial for making informed decisions. Inaccurate data can lead to flawed analyses and poor trading outcomes.
4. Consistency - maintaining consistent data formats and standards across various sources is essential for effective data integration and analysis.
5. Minimizing Latency - for applications requiring real-time data (e.g., trading algorithms), minimizing latency between data ingestion and availability is critical. Even slight delays can impact trading strategies and outcomes.
6. Heterogeneous Data Sources - crypto market data can come from numerous exchanges and platforms, each with its own API specifications and data formats. Integrating this data into a unified system requires sophisticated handling and standardization.
7. API Reliability - relying on multiple APIs increases the risk of downtime or inconsistent data delivery. This is the reason why it’s safer to use one data provider that guarantees more than 99% uptime and redundancy in 2025.
8. Data Security - protecting sensitive market data from breaches and unauthorized access as well as mplementing strong encryption, authentication, and access control measures is essential for all institutions.
9. Efficient Storage Solutions - storing vast amounts of historical and real-time data requires scalable and cost-effective storage solutions. Balancing storage costs with performance needs is a constant consideration.
10. Skilled Personnel - managing complex crypto data systems demands specialized knowledge in areas like data engineering, real-time processing, and cybersecurity.

What are the regulatory considerations surrounding crypto market data?

At the beginning of this article, we mentioned that governments around the world are introducing regulations to make crypto safer and more transparent. Most of them focus on protection against risks such as fraud, cyber security, data privacy, and money laundering or terrorist financing. Regulations, however, vary widely between countries. The EU led the way in cryptocurrency regulation by implementing pioneering rules that required crypto service providers to monitor and prevent illegal cryptocurrency activities. According to Donald Trump's announcement, regulations will change significantly in the U.S. states in 2025. A significant change will be the establishment of a new body that will replace the existing SEC in overseeing the crypto market. Meanwhile, it’s worth mentioning that there are still countries where crypto trading and mining are illegal or restricted like China, Iraq, Qatar, Tunisia, and more.

What does it look like when it comes to obtaining, distributing, and using crypto data? Many jurisdictions require the implementation of market surveillance systems and obligate exchanges and trading platforms to monitor for:

• market manipulation,
• fraud,
• suspicious trading patterns.

Moreover, data providers need to ensure that the collection, storage, and processing of crypto market data comply with international and regional data protection regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the EU or the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) in the USA.

New apps and platforms need to comply with Anti-Money Laundering (AML) and Know Your Customer (KYC) Regulations. They should:

• implement systems to monitor and report suspicious transactions that may indicate money laundering or fraudulent activities,
• ensure robust KYC processes are in place to verify the identities of users accessing crypto market data services.

Moreover, institutions, FinTech founders, traders, and researchers have to understand and comply with the specific regulatory requirements of each jurisdiction where the data is accessed or utilized. For example, they have to ensure that the use of crypto market data aligns with relevant taxation laws, especially when data contributes to financial reporting or analysis.

What emerging trends are shaping the future of cryptocurrency data?

Mitigating risks

In 2025, cryptocurrency markets are sure to attract many new institutional investors for whom digital assets were previously uncertain. Especially since the market is bullish at the end of 2024. These companies, however, will try to mitigate risk as much as possible at first, helped by the emergence of bitcoin ETFs or investments in crypto indexes. Therefore, index data (available through Indexes API) will be particularly important for large players and those who want to monitor the overall market situation.

High-frequency trading

As the crypto ecosystem becomes more interconnected, more investors are going to leverage arbitrage opportunities and high-frequency trading which makes ultra-low latency solutions (like FIX API connection) and efficient infrastructure even more important.

Machine Learning and artificial intelligence

Companies are developing machine learning models to predict market trends and identify investment opportunities. The comprehensive historical and real-time datasets will serve as a robust foundation for training these models. Then, those data will be used in automated trading systems to reduce human error.

Asset diversification

The cryptocurrency market is continually expanding with new tokens and exchanges. CoinAPI is broadening its data coverage to include a wider array of assets and trading platforms, ensuring that companies have access to diverse and up-to-date information.

How can businesses integrate crypto market data into their decision-making processes?

First things first. Start with an audit to check whether you have all the data needed to make successful decisions. Find out if the data are clear, normalized, and ready to use. To fetch current and past data you can leverage CoinAPI’s REST API or WebSocket connection. If you prefer data in formats such as CSV files to import then to Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets, it’s also easy to apply.

When you’re creating trading software, you should implement:

• Customized portfolio tracker to monitor and manage cryptocurrency investments in real time (you can use the React framework integrated with CoinAPI)
• trading algorithms that access the data, allowing for automated trading strategies based on current market conditions (and by current, we’re talking milliseconds).

You can also integrate multiple cryptocurrency exchange accounts into a single API and centralize your order routing process to get the best execution across exchanges thanks to an execution management system like EMS Trading API.

Moreover, you should utilize historical data to backtest trading strategies and simulate various market scenarios, refining approaches before actual implementation.

Considering working with an external data vendor? Read our e-book: 12 Things to Check When Choosing a Crypto Data Provider.