# VWAP

Also written volume-weighted average price, volume weighted average price.

*https://cryptomarkets.tools/glossary/vwap · next to Crypto Market Data APIs*

**Definition:** The average price of a set of trades with each weighted by its size, so total traded value over total traded quantity. In crypto there is no closing bell to reset it, so every VWAP carries a window someone chose — a rolling 24 hours, a UTC day, a candle — and a market set someone chose, from one exchange's pair to hundreds of venues converted into one currency. Name both before comparing two.

The four letters turn up on chart cards as an indicator, on execution cards as an order type,
and on data cards as the price itself. It is the same arithmetic in all three places, run over
different trades for different lengths of time.

## How it works

The formula never changes: add up price times quantity for every trade in the set, divide by the
quantity. What changes is the set, and in a market that trades around the clock there is no
exchange-declared session to fix it.

**One venue, a rolling window.** Binance's 24hr ticker returns `weightedAvgPrice`, defined in its
documentation as "QuoteVolume / Volume", over a "24 hour rolling window". A second endpoint takes
a `windowSize` from one minute upwards. Both windows slide: ask twice an hour apart and the
average covers two different sets of trades, neither aligned to any date.

**One venue, one candle.** Kraken's OHLC endpoint puts a `vwap` field in every candle, between the
close and the volume, and returns at most 720 of the most recent candles. Binance's klines carry
no VWAP field but do carry quote asset volume beside base volume, so the per-candle VWAP is the
one divided by the other. Kraken documents its last candle as the current, uncommitted one, so
its VWAP is still moving.

**Many venues, one reference price.** An aggregator's "price" is often a VWAP across exchanges.
CoinGecko's BTC-USD reference is a VWAP of BTC/USD, BTC/USDT, BTC/USDC and BTC/EUR tickers from
selected exchanges, with the stablecoin legs converted through its own onramp index. CoinAPI's
exchange rates are a rolling 24-hour VWAP across vetted spot venues, recomputed every second — and
by its own description the prices being averaged are quote midpoints weighted by resting volume,
with trade volume weighting on top. That is a volume-weighted average of the book, not of the
tape, under the same four letters.

**A chart's VWAP, from bars.** TradingView's indicator documents VWAP as the cumulative typical
price times volume over cumulative volume, reset by an anchor period — session, week, month and
longer. Typical price is a stand-in computed from each bar's high, low and close, so a chart VWAP
approximates the trade-level number rather than reproducing it, and on a 24-hour market the
"session" it resets on is a convention the platform picked rather than anything the venue declares.

## Why it matters here

**There is no official daily VWAP to check a vendor against.** An equity has a primary listing, a
session and a close. A crypto pair trades on dozens of venues with no shared clock, so a "daily
VWAP" is whatever day boundary and venue list the vendor chose, and a rolling 24-hour figure moves
every second. Two numbers labelled VWAP for the same pair on the same afternoon can both be
correct and still differ, and the difference says nothing about data quality until the window and
the market set are known.

**Per-exchange and aggregated are different products.** A single venue's VWAP is what trading on
that venue averaged. An aggregated one is a reference rate — useful for valuing a holding or
converting a currency, and useless as a benchmark for an order that could only have filled on one
exchange. [CoinAPI](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/coinapi) sells both shapes, and its own card points readers who want
"one VWAP number" to its Exchange Rates API rather than to the per-venue data.

**Market cap is often VWAP times supply.** [Messari](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/messari) documents market cap as
circulating supply times its VWAP, and [CoinGecko](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/coingecko-api) builds its dollar price
the way described above. A market cap that disagrees across two aggregators may be a supply
disagreement or a price disagreement; [reconciling supply and market
cap](https://cryptomarkets.tools/how-to/reconcile-supply-and-market-cap) separates the two.

**A VWAP order is judged against a VWAP someone has to define.** Execution products such as
[CoinAPI EMS](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/coinapi-ems) and [CoinRoutes](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/coinroutes) offer VWAP among their
algorithms. How well such an order did is usually judged against a benchmark VWAP over
the order's lifetime — on which venues, and whose trades, is part of the agreement and not a fact of the market. The same is true in reverse of any "beat VWAP" claim.

**On a chart it can be a paid feature.** [Quantower](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/quantower) leaves VWAP out of its
free version, and the free plan at [TensorCharts](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/tensorcharts) gates it as well. What the
indicator draws depends on the chart's candles and the platform's anchor, so a line on
[TradingView](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/tradingview) and a vendor's API figure for the same afternoon are not
expected to match to the cent.

## Where you will meet this

- [CoinAPI Market Data API](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/coinapi.md)
- [CoinGecko API](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/coingecko-api.md)
- [Messari](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/messari.md)
- [Binance Market Data API](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/binance-api.md)
- [TradingView](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/tradingview.md)
- [Quantower](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/quantower.md)
- [CoinAPI EMS Trading API](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/coinapi-ems.md)
- [CoinRoutes](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/coinroutes.md)
- [Bookmap](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/bookmap.md)
- [Exocharts](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/exocharts.md)
- [Highcharts Stock](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/highcharts-stock.md)
- [NautilusTrader](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/nautilus-trader.md)

## Sources

1. [Spot market data endpoints — 24hr ticker, rolling window ticker, klines](https://developers.binance.com/docs/binance-spot-api-docs/rest-api/market-data-endpoints) — Binance, read 2026-09-27
2. [Get OHLC data](https://docs.kraken.com/api/docs/rest-api/get-ohlc-data/) — Kraken, read 2026-09-27
3. [VWAP24 explained](https://www.coinapi.io/blog/vwap24-coinapi-explained) — CoinAPI, read 2026-09-27
4. [Methodology — price and BTC-USD reference](https://www.coingecko.com/en/methodology) — CoinGecko, read 2026-09-27
5. [Market Data Service — market cap and VWAP asset price](https://docs.messari.io/glossary/data-metrics/market-data-service) — Messari, read 2026-09-27
6. [Volume Weighted Average Price (VWAP)](https://www.tradingview.com/support/solutions/43000502018-volume-weighted-average-price-vwap/) — TradingView, read 2026-09-27

*Last updated 2026-09-27. A reference page, corrected in place — not a dated post.*