Imagine spending weeks building a crypto trading strategy, only to discover your data is missing half the trades from Binance. Your backtest fails, your model underperforms, and you’re back to square one. This is the reality for too many quant researchers until they discover CoinAPI’s Flat Files.
We’ve heard it before. In fact, another user told us: “I spent more time cleaning the data than running the analysis.” And another: “We couldn’t reproduce our own results three weeks later.”
This article is for quants, researchers, and engineers who are tired of scraping CSVs, patching together inconsistent APIs, or rebuilding market data every time an exchange drops support. It’s about how to download historical crypto data completely and consistently, without compromise.
Flat Files: The Smarter Way to Download Crypto Data
Flat files are bulk datasets available for crypto data download via AWS S3 or FTP in structured formats like CSV or JSON. Unlike traditional APIs, which deliver data slice-by-slice, flat files let you download entire historical datasets at once, complete, timestamp-aligned, and analysis-ready.
With CoinAPI, you can download crypto market data across multiple asset classes, timeframes, and formats:
- Trades (Tick-by-Tick): Every executed trade across 380+ venues
- Quotes (Bid/Ask Updates): With millisecond precision, ideal for latency and spread studies
- Order Book Snapshots (L2): Full depth, regularly captured for accurate fill simulations
- OHLCV Bars: 1-min, hourly, and daily bars optimized for backtesting
These crypto flat files are used daily by trading desks and data science teams needing scale, speed, and structure.
“Trying to simulate passive fills across 10 venues, but order book snapshots are a mess.” - Quant from mid-sized crypto fund
“We want to reconstruct liquidity depth at mid-price ±0.5% over 8-hour windows. Free APIs can't handle that.” — Data Science Lead, DeFi analytics firm
Why Bulk Downloads Beat Real-Time Pulls for Research
Pulling crypto price data from APIs has limits:
- Rate throttles from free tiers
- Partial market coverage
- Fragile retry logic during network hiccups
But with bulk crypto data files via CoinAPI:
- You get full intraday and historical depth
- You can download crypto tick data for trades or L2 order books
- Files are schema-consistent across exchanges and normalized for analysis
“Free APIs don’t cut it anymore. Need clean, aligned 1-minute bars across exchanges.” — ML Researcher, institutional desk
Ideal for:
- Running multi-year backtests
- ML model training with OHLCV and trade data
- Simulating fills with bid/ask historical data
How to Download Historical Crypto Data from CoinAPI
Step 1: Create a CoinAPI account
Step 2: Add credits (1 credit = 1MB). You’ll get $25 in free credits after verifying your payment method and generating your first Flat File API key.
Step 3: Browse and list files by exchange, symbol, or data type
Step 4: Download using S3 tools, REST-style endpoints, or code
AWS CLI:
aws s3 cp s3://coinapi-historical-data/BINANCE_SPOT_BTC_USDT/quotes/2023/ quotes/ --recursive
1import boto3
2s3 = boto3.client('s3')
3s3.download_file('coinapi-historical-data', 'BINANCE_SPOT_BTC_USDT/quotes/2023/01.csv', 'local_file.csv')You now have millisecond-level crypto data ready for Pandas, Spark, your ETL workflows, or REST-style download tools. CoinAPI's S3-compatible interface supports GET, LIST, and HEAD operations — ideal for scripting and automation.
What’s Inside a CoinAPI Flat File?
Here’s how each market data file download looks:
Here’s how each market data file download looks:
Quotes
Timestamp Bid Price Bid Size Ask Price Ask Size 2024-12-10T14:32:01Z 41250.50 0.584 41251.00 0.340
Trades
Timestamp Price Size Side 2024-12-10T14:32:01Z 41250.50 0.10 buy
Order Book Snapshots (L2)
Timestamp Price Size Side 2024-12-10T14:32:01Z 41250.00 1.122 bid 2024-12-10T14:32:01Z 41251.50 0.945 ask
When Should You Use Flat Files vs API?
For detailed guidance on choosing between these approaches, see our comprehensive guide: REST API or Flat Files: Choosing the best crypto data access method.
Common Pitfalls Without Flat Files
For researchers and risk teams, poor-quality historical data isn’t just inconvenient - it creates real compliance, audit, and reproducibility issues. Without well-structured files, it’s nearly impossible to replicate results, document model behavior, or justify price points in audits.
- Patching incomplete crypto data downloads from free APIs
- Rebuilding symbol and asset mappings manually
- Estimating liquidity from fragmented bid/ask data - including passive depth within custom mid-price windows (e.g., ±0.5%), which CoinAPI supports through full quote and book snapshots
- Lacking confirmation of asset depreciation (survivorship bias)
With CoinAPI Flat Files:
- Timestamps are aligned and schema is consistent, making them suitable for backtesting, compliance reporting, and audit trails
- Metadata like
data_endensures transparency around delisted assets, crucial for avoiding survivorship bias in long-term strategies - Everything is normalized
- Every venue is consistently mapped
- Files are available after UTC midnight for the previous day, typically before 06:00 UTC, depending on data volume
Coming Soon: Push API for Flat Files
CoinAPI is building a Push API that delivers files to your system automatically.
No polling. No cron scripts. Just clean crypto market data ready when you are.
Perfect for nightly ETLs, quant research pipelines, or shared data lakes.
TL;DR - Why CoinAPI Flat Files?
- Designed for quants, researchers, and engineers with high-performance, research-grade expectations
- Backtest-ready, reproducible, and structured to meet regulatory needs
- Trusted by data teams who need accurate market context for every trade and tick
- Best option to download crypto historical data in bulk
- Ideal for backtests, ML models, passive fill simulations, and arbitrage logic
- Covers tick-level trades, full order books, OHLCV, and quotes
“We switched from scraping Binance and never looked back.” — Head of Quant Infra, crypto prop desk
Want to explore?
