Crypto Quotes Data

Crypto Quotes Data API

Access historical quote updates through REST, stream live bid and ask updates with WebSocket, integrate with AI applications through the CoinAPI MCP Server, or consume quote market data through FIX.

CoinAPI provides normalized cryptocurrency quote data for monitoring market liquidity, analyzing bid-ask spreads, building trading applications, and powering AI-driven financial applications.

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What Is Crypto Quotes Data?

A quote represents the best available bid and ask prices for a trading market at a specific moment.

Unlike trades, which record completed transactions, quotes show the highest price buyers are willing to pay and the lowest price sellers are willing to accept. Together, they provide a real-time view of the market before a trade occurs.

This makes quote data essential for applications that monitor liquidity, calculate bid-ask spreads, analyze market conditions, or display live pricing. Instead of tracking every order book level, developers can work with the top of the book while still capturing how market prices evolve over time.

Quote data is useful when applications need to understand the price available before execution, not only the price after a trade has happened.

By comparing bid and ask prices over time, developers can measure spread behavior, market tightness, and potential execution costs.

Bid and ask sizes also help indicate how much liquidity is immediately available at the best visible price.

This makes quotes especially useful for trading interfaces, pricing widgets, market monitoring tools, arbitrage systems, and execution-quality analysis.

When normalized across exchanges, crypto quote data helps developers compare top-of-book conditions across venues without adapting to each exchange’s native format.

What's Included in CoinAPI Quotes Data?

Each CoinAPI quote represents the best bid and ask available for a market and includes pricing information, timestamps, and market depth at the top of the order book.

FieldWhat it means
symbol_idCoinAPI normalized symbol identifier
time_exchangeTimestamp reported by the exchange
time_coinapiTimestamp when CoinAPI received the quote update
bid_priceBest available bid price
bid_sizeVolume resting at the best bid price (0 indicates unknown size)
ask_priceBest available ask price
ask_sizeVolume resting at the best ask price (0 indicates unknown size)
last_tradeCurrent endpoints may include the latest executed trade with price, size, timestamps, UUID, and taker side
sequenceWebSocket sequence number for the current connection

Together, these fields provide the information needed to calculate bid-ask spreads, monitor liquidity, build live market dashboards, estimate execution prices, and analyze changing market conditions.

Available REST Endpoints

CoinAPI provides REST endpoints for retrieving historical quote updates, current quote snapshots, current quotes for individual symbols, latest quote updates, and latest updates for specific symbols. For applications requiring continuously updated market prices, quotes are also available through the CoinAPI WebSocket API.

Historical Quotes

Returns historical quote updates for a specific CoinAPI symbol. Data is returned in ascending chronological order.

Response includes
  • exchange and CoinAPI timestamps
  • best bid price and size
  • best ask price and size

Use date to retrieve a full trading day, or time_start and time_end for custom ranges including cross-day queries. APITP data supports hourly retrieval with automatic fallback to daily data for older records. The limit parameter supports up to 100,000 items.

Parameters:symbol_id • date • time_start • time_end • limit

Current Quotes

Returns current quote snapshots for all symbols or filtered symbols. When requesting a single symbol, the response contains a single object rather than a JSON array.

Response includes
  • current bid and ask prices
  • bid and ask sizes
  • exchange and CoinAPI timestamps
  • latest trade information when available

Supports filtering by CoinAPI symbol identifiers and by exchange identifiers. Current quote snapshots may include the latest executed trade.

Parameters:filter_symbol_id • filter_exchange_id

Current Quote by Symbol

Returns the current quote snapshot for a specific CoinAPI symbol.

Response includes
  • current bid and ask prices
  • bid and ask sizes
  • exchange and CoinAPI timestamps
  • latest trade information when available

Returns the current quote for a single CoinAPI symbol. Current quote snapshots may include the latest executed trade.

Parameters:symbol_id

Latest Quotes

Returns the latest quote updates across supported markets. Data is returned in descending chronological order.

Response includes
  • exchange and CoinAPI timestamps
  • best bid and ask prices
  • bid and ask sizes

Latest quote updates include data from up to 1 minute ago and support filtering by symbol and exchange. The limit parameter supports up to 100,000 items.

Parameters:filter_symbol_id • filter_exchange_id • limit

Latest Quotes by Symbol

Returns the latest quote updates for a specific CoinAPI symbol.

Response includes
  • exchange and CoinAPI timestamps
  • best bid and ask prices
  • bid and ask sizes

Latest quote updates are returned in descending chronological order and support up to 100,000 returned records.

Parameters:symbol_id • limit

Live Quote Streaming with WebSocket

For applications requiring continuously updated market prices, CoinAPI provides real-time quote streaming through the WebSocket API.

Unlike REST endpoints, which retrieve historical or recent quote updates, WebSocket streams quote messages whenever the best bid or best ask changes for subscribed symbols on supported exchanges.

Each quote message includes the current best bid and ask prices, available sizes, timestamps, and a connection-specific sequence number.

If the reported bid or ask size is 0, the exchange has not provided the resting volume for that side of the market.

WebSocket quote data is commonly used for trading platforms, live pricing dashboards, spread monitoring, execution algorithms, and market surveillance systems.

CoinAPI Quotes Dataset Characteristics

  • Available through REST API, WebSocket API, the CoinAPI MCP Server, and FIX market data integration
  • Historical quotes returned in ascending chronological order
  • Latest quote updates returned in descending chronological order
  • Current quote snapshots available for all symbols or individual symbols
  • WebSocket streams quote updates whenever the best bid or ask changes for subscribed symbols on supported exchanges
  • ISO 8601 UTC timestamps
  • Normalized CoinAPI symbol identifiers
  • Bid and ask sizes may be 0 when the exchange does not report available volume
  • Historical requests support up to 100,000 records
  • Filtering supported by symbol and exchange where documented
  • Quote retrieval available through the CoinAPI MCP Server
  • FIX supports quote market data subscriptions using market data requests

Why Developers Use Quotes Instead of Trades

Trades show completed market executions. Quotes show the prices currently available for buying and selling before a trade takes place.

If you're monitoring spreads, estimating execution prices, or displaying live market prices, quotes are usually the better starting point. When you need to analyze completed transactions or market activity after execution, trade data provides the additional level of detail.

If you need…Use
Current bid and ask pricesQuotes
Bid-ask spread analysisQuotes
Market liquidity at the top of the bookQuotes
Live pricing dashboardsQuotes
Individual market executionsTrades
Tick-level trade historyTrades
Trade direction analysisTrades

Many production systems combine both datasets. Developers often monitor quotes to observe changing market conditions while using trades to analyze which transactions actually executed as prices moved.

Crypto Quotes Use Cases

  • Build live price dashboards
  • Monitor bid-ask spreads
  • Analyze market liquidity
  • Support algorithmic trading
  • Power AI trading applications
  • Research market microstructure

Who Uses Crypto Quotes Data?

  • Trading platforms
  • Quantitative funds
  • Algorithmic trading systems
  • Fintech applications
  • AI and machine learning teams
  • Researchers and universities
Crypto Quotes Data

Ready to Build with CoinAPI Quotes Data?

Explore the Quotes documentation to retrieve historical quote updates, current market snapshots, latest quote activity, and real-time bid and ask streams using standardized CoinAPI symbols.

As your application evolves, combine Quotes with Trades, OHLCV, Order Books, Metadata, WebSocket streams, FIX, MCP, and Exchange Rates to build a complete cryptocurrency market data platform on top of the CoinAPI ecosystem.

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