🚀 Market Data API vs Enterprise vs Exchange Link:

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August 22, 2025

Flat Files vs Market Data API

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Choosing between CoinAPI’s Market Data API and Flat Files is like choosing between live television and recorded archives:

  • Market Data API = live TV. You see trades, quotes, and order book updates as they happen. It’s all about speed, latency, and reliability, with the option to rewind or query past events on demand.
  • Flat Files = recorded archives. You get complete historical data neatly packaged into daily files. The focus is on completeness and availability, not speed. Perfect for backtesting, compliance, and ML pipelines.
  • If latency matters → choose Market Data API.
  • If completeness matters → choose Flat Files.

Most serious desks don’t stop at one; they use both. Flat Files provide the long-range telescope for years of historical context, while the Market Data API is the microscope for real-time execution and millisecond reactions.

FeatureMarket Data APIFlat Files
Delivery ModelREST, WebSocket, FIX (real-time & historical)S3-compatible API (daily batch files)
LatencySub-100ms, optimized for tradingDelivered end-of-day (latency irrelevant)
SLA focusUptime & response speedFile availability in storage
FormatJSON (streams & queries)CSV/Parquet (compressed, bulk)
Best ForTraders & devs: live trading apps, dashboards, botsAnalysts & quants: backtesting, compliance, ML training
  • You need real-time market visibility with ultra-low latency.
  • You’re building trading platforms, arbitrage bots, or execution systems.
  • You require on-demand historical queries (e.g., fetching trades from last week).

Example: A trading bot subscribing to BTC/USDT trades over WebSocket to react within milliseconds.

Edge: Market Data API delivers both live streaming data (WebSocket/FIX) and flexible historical queries (REST) in one interface. With sub-100ms latency, it’s purpose-built for trading strategies where every millisecond counts.

  • You need bulk historical data across years and exchanges.
  • You’re doing machine learning model training or large-scale backtesting.
  • You need immutable archives for compliance or audit.

Example: A quant team downloading 2 years of Binance trades and order books (~50GB compressed) for reproducible ML research.

Edge: Flat Files provide complete daily snapshots of tick-level trades, quotes, and order books - compressed in CSV or Parquet for easy loading into data warehouses. They’re far more credit-efficient than APIs when pulling terabytes of data.

Flat Files shine when you need years of reliable history for backtests or compliance. For a closer look at why bulk S3 downloads are credit-efficient, see Crypto Data Download: The Flat Files Advantage

In practice, most teams combine both:

  • Flat Files to build models, perform audits, or run backtests.
  • Market Data API to zoom into live execution, dashboards, or low-latency routing.

This dual approach balances historical depth with real-time agility.

  • Market Data API → REST for queries, WebSocket/FIX for streams. Stateless requests (REST) or continuous real-time feeds.
  • Flat Files → Pulled from an S3-compatible API as .csv.gz or Parquet. Delivered daily by 06:00 UTC. (Push API coming soon for direct delivery to customer S3 buckets.)
  • Market Data API → Updates flow instantly. Ideal for live dashboards, smart order routing, execution systems.
  • Flat Files → Uploaded daily, hours after market close. Ideal for historical analysis, strategy backtesting, ML pipelines, regulatory archiving.
  • Market Data API → Trades, quotes, order books (L2/L3), OHLCV, exchange rates, indexes, metadata.
  • Flat Files → Tick-by-tick trades, L1 quotes, full L2/L3 books, OHLCV (coming soon).
  • Market Data API → Fine-grained queries down to seconds, symbol-specific filtering.
  • Flat Files → Full daily dumps — optimized for completeness, not filtering.
  • Market Data API → Credits used per query (1 credit = up to 100 data points). Streams billed by subscription quotas. Great for fine-grained, continuous queries.
  • Flat Files → Requires prepaid credits for downloads. More cost-efficient for bulk datasets (multi-GB).
  • Market Data API → Plug-and-play for trading systems, bots, dashboards. SDKs in Python, Java, Go.
  • Flat Files → Integrates with data warehouses (Snowflake, BigQuery, S3 data lakes). Designed for research and quant workflows.

Both provide market data — but they solve different problems.

  • Market Data API = speed-sensitive, real-time stream.
  • Flat Files = completeness-driven, historical archive.

Rule of thumb:

  • If latency matters → choose Market Data API.
  • If completeness matters → choose Flat Files.
  • Traders & Developers → Market Data API (dashboards, bots, execution engines).
  • Quants & Researchers → Flat Files (backtests, ML training, compliance).
  • Hybrid Teams → Start with Flat Files for bulk analysis, then zoom into live execution with Market Data API.
  • Is Flat Files just a slower Market Data API? No. Market Data API = real-time streaming, Flat Files = bulk archives.
  • Which for backtesting? Flat Files. Large daily datasets perfect for multi-year backtests.
  • Does Market Data API include history? Yes, via REST queries — but optimized for shorter time ranges.
  • When are Flat Files updated? Daily, usually by 06:00 UTC.
  • Which is more cost-efficient?
    • Market Data API for fine-grained or real-time feeds.
    • Flat Files for multi-GB historical pulls.
  • Can Flat Files go into data warehouses? Yes, CSV/Parquet formats make it simple for Snowflake, BigQuery, ML pipelines.

Think of CoinAPI’s products as complementary lenses:

  • Market Data API = your microscope for real-time trading and targeted queries.
  • Flat Files = your telescope for long-range historical research and model training.

For serious crypto data workflows, most teams use both - Flat Files for the history, Market Data API for the live edge.

Next step: Explore the CoinAPI docs and test both to see which lane fits your stack.

Still deciding between APIs and bulk files? We’ve broken it down further in REST API or Flat Files: Choosing the best crypto data access method.

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