The CoinSpectrum API

curl https://coin-spectrum.com/api/v1/assets/xrp.json

Design

Every endpoint is a plain JSON file. There are no query parameters and no auth on the free tier. Download the file, filter in the client. That is deliberate: it keeps the free tier truly free, and it keeps the surface small enough that a version bump is a real event.

Base URL

https://coin-spectrum.com/api/v1/

Versioned from day one. Adding a field is a minor change and lands silently; renaming, removing, or changing a shape opens v2/, and v1/ is frozen for at least twelve months.

Endpoints

• GET /meta.json Try it ↗

  Schema version, counts, license, endpoint list. A one-shot health check for a consumer starting up.

• GET /global.json Try it ↗

  Total market cap, per-category counts, chains, and the fiat exchange rates the site uses for currency conversion.

• GET /assets.json Try it ↗

  Every asset in one file — around 1.3 MB. Pull once, filter in memory; cheaper than one call per asset.

• GET /assets/{slug}.json Try xrp ↗

  A single asset by its CoinSpectrum slug — e.g. bitcoin, xrp, digibyte. The slug matches the page URL at /assets/{slug}/.

• GET /categories/cryptocurrencies.json Try it ↗

  The ranking — assets with their own blockchain and their own consensus mechanism. Nothing else.

• GET /categories/stablecoins.json Try it ↗

  Fiat-pegged tokens. Listed on the site but never added to the cryptocurrency total.

• GET /categories/wrapped.json Try it ↗

  Wrapped, staked and pegged representations of assets that are already counted somewhere else.

• GET /categories/tokens.json Try it ↗

  Non-crypto tokens — utility, governance, and the long tail of things issued on someone else's chain.

• GET /categories/memecoins.json Try it ↗

  Memecoins. Same shape, kept separate because they deserve their own bucket and their own explanation.

• GET /sorted/mcap.json Try it ↗

  Slug + market cap only, pre-sorted descending. Small enough to be the ranking's cheapest paint.

• GET /live.json Try it ↗

  Updated every 60 s. Per-coin aggregated USD price — the median of every exchange in the 24-venue panel that quoted the coin within the 0.25×..4× anchor band. Each asset carries every confirming venue (sources_consulted), the venue count, the 6-hour snapshot anchor (snapshot_usd) and picked_single for consumers that want a single-venue read. The industry-standard pattern (CoinGecko, CoinPaprika and CryptoCompare's CCIX all compute some flavour of outlier-filtered-then-averaged), done on the box so a consumer doesn't have to re-run the picker.

• GET /quotes.json Try it ↗

  Updated every 60 s. Compact companion to /live.json: a single assets map of symbol → [price_usd_now, price_usd_24h_ago]. Nothing else — no venue list, no snapshot anchor, no volume — so a ticker tape, a widget or a browser price row can decide what to show from two numbers per asset. Around 60 KB over the wire; the same generated_at as /live.json, so a client that reads both sees them agree. Powers CoinSpectrum's own embeddable live tiles.

• GET /spark.json Try it ↗

  Updated every 60 s. Rolling 1,440-sample price buffer for every quoted coin — one array per symbol, oldest at [0], newest at [length-1], one slot per minute of the past 24 hours. Missing-tick slots are null (venue outage, briefly outside the band) so a chart renders a line gap rather than a fake interpolation. Around 16 MB; cache it.

A worked example

Chain jq for a pure Bash pipeline that names every SHA-256 chain in the ranking:

curl -s https://coin-spectrum.com/api/v1/categories/cryptocurrencies.json \
  | jq -r '.assets[] | select(.consensus == "SHA-256") | .name'

Asset schema

Every asset — cryptocurrency, stablecoin, wrapped, token, memecoin — uses the same shape. Fields that don't apply stay null, never omitted.

{
  "slug":            "bitcoin",
  "symbol":          "BTC",
  "name":            "Bitcoin",
  "category":        "cryptocurrency",
  "consensus":       "SHA-256",
  "hashrate":        8.9e20,
  "price_usd":       81449.12,
  "price_source": {
    "method":        "exchange",
    "aggregation":   "median",
    "confirmed_by":  ["Binance","Bybit","OKX","Kraken","Bitstamp", /* ...22 total... */],
    "count":         22,
    "picked_single": { "venue": "Binance", "price_usd": 81445.52 },
    "live_url":      "/api/v1/live.json"
  },
  "change_pct_24h":  null,
  "volume_24h_usd":  37424313548,
  "market_cap_usd":  1553734997147,
  "rank":            1,
  "supply": { "circulating": 20076428, "max": 21000000 },
  "ledger":          "overlay",
  "nature":          "commodity",
  "nature_basis":    "Named a digital commodity in the joint SEC-CFTC interpretation.",
  "nature_tags":     ["commodity"],
  "chains":          null,
  "image":           "https://..."
}

price_source.method is "exchange" when at least one exchange in the 24-venue panel quoted the coin within the 0.25×..4× anchor band at the build; "snapshot" when none did (long-tail coin, newly listed, CMC-only — the second-hand price in price_usd comes from the 6-hourly aggregated snapshot). About 38% of assets are exchange-sourced and 62% are snapshot-only at any given build. change_pct_24h stays null until the provider pipeline carries 24h change through — the field is in the shape so adding the data later doesn't break clients.

Update cadence

Two cadences, two publishers:

• Structured /api/v1/* files — every 6 hours. The heavy pipeline runs build-data.mjs + pages.mjs + api.mjs to rebuild the whole tree. Carries supply, classification, hashrate, nature, DEX volume and the snapshot price. meta.json's update_cadence_minutes: 360 is this cadence.
• Live overlay — every 60 seconds. /api/v1/live.json and /api/v1/spark.json are rebuilt by coinspectrum-live.service on a 60-second timer, writing a median-aggregated price per coin and appending to a 24-hour sparkline buffer. For comparison, CoinGecko caches most public endpoints for one to five minutes and its paid price endpoint for 20 to 30 seconds; exchanges themselves stream in real time.

Every response includes a generated_at ISO-8601 timestamp; a caller who wants the freshest reading should read that field rather than trust HTTP dates. For near-real-time price in the per-asset shape, pull the asset's price_source.live_url once per minute instead of refetching the 6-hourly file.

Rate limits

The free tier has no per-key limit — every response is a static file behind a CDN, so throughput is effectively bounded by the CDN itself. Please cache. Aggressive polling of a file that only changes every 60 s (live overlay) or every 6 h (snapshot) is wasteful for both sides.

Paid tiers planned

Not open yet: no payment is taken and no paid key is issued. The free tier above is the whole API today; test it first. When the paid tiers open they will add higher throughput, historical snapshots, webhooks and per-key identification. Prices will be quoted in USD and invoices settled in Bitcoin Cash only, locked at the spot rate for fifteen minutes.

Why Bitcoin Cash

The Bitcoin whitepaper opens by naming the problem the system is for: "commerce on the Internet", through "completely non-reversible transactions", with fees low enough that "small casual transactions" are possible. The paper is explicit that the cost of a mediator ruling disputes is what rules microtransactions out, and that non-reversibility is the alternative. The abstract follows: "a purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution." Payments, direct, with fees low enough for the small end — the design brief in one line.

BCH kept those properties: block space sized for everyday transactions, sub-cent on-chain fees, no replace-by-fee by default so an unconfirmed payment is a payment, and a chain of small transactions is exactly what the paper's double-spending analysis in Section 11 is built on. BTC's current form has moved its answer: on-chain fees above a cent, replace-by-fee by default, Lightning for everyday payments, and the most visible proponents describe BTC as "digital gold" or a store of value rather than a payment network. That is a legitimate choice; it is also, by its proponents' own words, no longer the whitepaper's answer.

CoinSpectrum uses BCH for payments for the same reason the whitepaper did: it is the system the paper describes. Other coins that match the same design — non-reversible, cheap enough for small payments, confirmed quickly — may be added as payment options later. The payment choice is independent of the CoinSpectrum Grade: BCH's grade comes from the published criteria, not from the API happening to settle in it.

Planned: annual plans pay ten monthly invoices in one BCH transaction and get two months free. No card processor, no chargebacks, no KYC — payment will be a single on-chain transaction and the API key will activate on the first confirmation.

Attribution

Licensed under CC BY 4.0. Use the data anywhere, commercial use included. In return, please link back to coin-spectrum.com — a footer credit or a note in your project's README is enough. The API exists to be reused; a link is how it stays sustainable.

No warranty

The data is derived from public sources — see methodology. It is provided as-is, without warranty of any kind. If you use it to decide whether to spend money, that is entirely your call and entirely your risk.

Contact

Questions, bug reports, or a request for an endpoint that isn't here yet: open an issue or write to api@coin-spectrum.com.

Common questions