What to use instead of Skew

The product

Skew was a derivatives analytics platform, founded in London in 2018 and sold under the name skewAnalytics. The pitch on its own home page was "leading real-time analytics for cryptocurrency markets — Bitcoin and Ethereum Spot, Futures, Options, and more", and the product behind it was a dashboard builder: 350-plus charts to choose from, custom dashboards, a set of prepared market-data dashboards, and a Data Download that handed you the CSV behind any chart. By the end the site claimed 9,500 dashboards created. It was where a research note's chart of aggregate open interest or the bitcoin volatility term structure usually came from.

It was never cheap and, at the end, never free. The final pricing was 279 dollars a month for one seat, 558 for two, 159 for each additional seat, and the page said the platform was for corporates only, subject to an eligibility check.

Coinbase bought the company in 2021. The cleanest record of that is Coinbase's own Form 10-Q for the quarter ended 30 June 2021, filed on 11 August 2021, which says plainly: "In May, Coinbase acquired Skew LTD (Skew), a leading institutional data and analytics platform." The same filing records the consideration — "In May 2021, we issued 95,628 shares of our Class A common stock to 20 accredited investors in connection with our acquisition of Skew."

The end came fourteen months later. On 25 July 2022 Skew posted "Continuing our journey with Coinbase Prime", and the operative sentence is one line: "With the recent launch of Prime Analytics, skew will no longer be available as a stand alone platform after September 25th, 2022." Existing monthly memberships renewed through 25 August 2022 and then expired at the next renewal. Users were pointed at Coinbase Prime Analytics, "powered by skew technology", free with a Coinbase Prime account — which is an institutional brokerage account, not a login to a chart site.

Four years on the shutdown is thorough. Checked on 21 September 2026: skew.com resolves to a single address, but port 443 never answers and the connection times out; port 80 returns a MarkMonitor "registered and protected" holding page; api.skew.com has no DNS record at all. The registry lists MarkMonitor as registrar with the delete, transfer and update locks set. That is a large company sitting on a brand, not a product with a maintenance page.

Two notes on sourcing. The farewell post and the home-page banner were read from Internet Archive captures taken on 18 August 2022 and 23 September 2022, because the live host now returns a 404 for every path under it. The acquisition wording is from the SEC filing rather than from the press release, because the filing is the version Coinbase had to stand behind.

What to use instead

The awkward part first — nothing here is skew, and two of its four pieces are simply gone. The aggregated cross-venue series computed to one methodology, and the single subscription that covered futures and options and the underlying CSV, do not exist in this catalogue at any price. What does exist is the two halves, sold separately, mostly by companies with a different reader in mind.

If what you watched was the options screens. Laevitas is the closest thing on this list and the reason it is first: option chains, Greeks, term structure and a calibrated volatility surface, next to funding and liquidations, with a multi-leg builder and an options backtester on top. It is free to look at and 50 dollars a month to keep a layout, which is roughly a fifth of a skew seat. The venue set is narrow — Deribit, OKX, Bybit and Hyperliquid — which is less a limitation of the product than a fact about where crypto options actually trade. SignalPlus is the other free options screen worth knowing about; it is built as a trading terminal with a vol lab attached rather than as an analytics site, so the greeks book expects you to connect an exchange.

If what you watched was the futures dashboards. CoinGlass is the default answer and costs nothing — open interest, funding, liquidation heatmaps, long/short ratios and exchange balances across roughly thirty futures venues, in a browser, with a 28-dollar Prime tier for the rest. Coinalyze does the same job in a different shape: sixteen venues as one sortable table of open interest, funding, basis and liquidations, with custom metrics and a free API, which makes it the better fit if what you actually miss is scanning a list rather than reading a chart. CoinAnk is the third of these and adds order-flow footprint and Hyperliquid whale positions, with the order-flow charts behind a VIP tier.

If you had a seat because a desk paid for it. Hyblock Capital is the only pick priced like a professional tool — 99 dollars for Advanced, 499 for Professional — and the only one with a backtesting lab against its own positioning metrics. Charts render inside an embedded TradingView rather than in a bespoke renderer, which is either a relief or a downgrade depending on what you liked about skew.

If what you actually used was the Data Download. The CSV-behind-the-chart button has no free equivalent; it is a paid API now. Laevitas API sells the options side — Greeks, a proprietary volatility surface, funding, open interest and liquidations — over REST, WebSocket or MCP, with a pay-per-request option. CoinGlass API sells the futures side from 35 dollars a month. Amberdata is the institutional version, sold per exchange and per market from 600 dollars a month, and is the one a former skew customer's procurement department will recognise. For history rather than live values, Tardis.dev has tick trades, books and options chains from 64 exchange feeds since 2019.

What you give up

The single aggregate number, computed one way. Skew's best-known charts were cross-venue aggregates — total futures open interest, total options volume — and their value was that one vendor computed them the same way every day. Every replacement here aggregates differently: different venue sets, different treatment of coin-margined versus USD-margined contracts, different decisions about what counts as an option. A series you were quoting will not continue; it will restart at a different level. Anyone who spliced CoinGlass onto a skew chart and published the join published an artefact.

The two halves on one bill. Skew charged one seat price for futures and options together, plus the data behind both. Reassembling that costs a Laevitas subscription for the options, a CoinGlass or Coinalyze tab for the futures, and an API plan on top if you need the numbers rather than the picture — three logins and three renewal dates where there was one.

The archive. Whatever skew held for 2018 to 2022 went dark with the site, and no card here backfills it. Tardis.dev starts in 2019 and only for the feeds it captured; the free screeners generally keep a rolling window rather than a history. If a chart of that period matters to you, the only copies left are the ones people screenshotted into research notes.

Being the customer. Skew sold seats to corporates at 279 dollars, which bought support, an eligibility check and a vendor that answered. Three of the six picks are free consumer products funded by subscriptions and advertising, with no published methodology, no SLA and no obligation to tell you when a metric's definition changes. That is a real trade, and it is the one that catches people who are reproducing a number rather than eyeballing it.

Anything Coinbase kept. Prime Analytics exists and is reportedly free, but it is free behind a Coinbase Prime account, which is an institutional onboarding rather than a signup. If you are not that customer, the successor to skew is not available to you at all, and none of the above is a substitute for it — they are substitutes for the site that closed.

Migration notes

Expect to rebuild the numbers, not to repoint a chart. There is no vendor here whose series line up with skew's, and the mismatches are systematic rather than noise.

• Open interest is denominated three ways. Contracts, coin, and notional USD, and a venue can report one while a vendor displays another. A coin-margined contract's notional moves when the price moves even if nobody trades, so "open interest fell" can mean "bitcoin fell". Check which unit each replacement is charting before comparing anything to a remembered level.
• Aggregates double-count differently. Some vendors sum every venue's reported open interest; some exclude venues they consider unreliable; some net out an exchange's own hedging products. None of them publish the full rule. Two "total open interest" charts diverging by 20 percent is normal and is not a bug in either.
• Funding is quoted per interval on some screens and annualised on others, and the interval itself differs by venue — eight hours on most, one hour on some perp DEXes. A funding heatmap is not comparable across venues unless the vendor normalised it, and most say whether they did in a tooltip rather than in documentation.
• Implied volatility is a model output, not a measurement. Each vendor calibrates its own surface, interpolates missing strikes its own way and picks its own risk-free rate. Skew's numbers and Laevitas's numbers are two models of the same option chain. Do not treat a gap as a signal.
• The venue set decides the chart. Skew's aggregates included venues that no longer exist, and every current screener covers the venues that exist now. A level from 2021 and a level from today are measurements of different markets even where the metric name is identical.
• Export is a separate purchase now. If a workflow read skew's CSV download, budget an API plan for it, and check the redistribution terms before putting the numbers in anything a client sees.

The rest of the field is in Crypto Charting Platforms & Libraries, and the options-specific tools are collected in Crypto options tools.