Bybit Market Data API

What it is

Bybit documents this as the /v5/market/ section of its V5 API — the part of the exchange's interface that answers without a key. Twenty-odd endpoints: tickers, kline and its mark, index and premium-index variants, orderbook, recent-trade, instruments-info, funding/history, open-interest, long-short-ratio, historical volatility for options, delivery-price, index-components, insurance and the risk-limit and price-limit tables. Six public websocket hosts sit alongside them, one per product line.

The venue itself is out of scope here — this catalogue does not list places to trade. What is in scope is that the data endpoint is sold on its own terms, which in this case means no terms involving money: nothing in the market section is gated behind a funded balance, a KYC check or a plan.

The reason to reach for it over an aggregator is the derivatives side. Funding rate history, open interest sampled at fixed intervals, the long/short account ratio, option implied volatility and the insurance pool are venue-specific numbers that most price aggregators either do not carry or carry at a coarser resolution. The spot tape is ordinary; the perpetuals telemetry is not.

Pricing

There is nothing to buy. No pricing page exists for the market endpoints because there is no product to price, and no tier, quota or history window is unlocked by paying Bybit anything.

That has one consequence worth planning for: there is also no support contract and no availability commitment attached to the data. Bybit's API Terms disclaim the APIs "as is" and "as available", reserve the right to change them without notice or documentation updates, and allow suspension of access "for any reason whatsoever without prior notice". Free here means free of charge and free of promises in equal measure.

Data & coverage

One venue, four product lines. As of 19 September 2026 the instruments endpoint returned 536 spot symbols, 879 linear contracts, 28 inverse contracts and 798 option series — counts that move weekly, and the option figure daily as series expire, so re-read them yourself rather than trusting a marketing figure.

Rate limits are per IP on the public side, and that is the architecture decision. The documented ceiling is 600 HTTP requests in any rolling 5-second window per IP. Exceed it and you get 403, access too frequent, with the advice to close all sessions and wait at least ten minutes for the automatic unban. The per-endpoint rate-limit table that Bybit publishes is keyed on UID and covers the trade, position, account, asset, user and spot-margin routes only — none of the market routes appear in it. So a fleet of containers behind one NAT shares a single budget, and the fix is more egress addresses rather than more keys.

Websockets are limited per IP too: no more than 500 connections opened in any 5-minute window, and no more than 1,000 concurrent market-data connections per IP, counted separately for spot, linear, inverse and options.

Order book depth is generous and unusually honest about what it omits. REST returns a 1,000-level snapshot for spot and contracts and 25 levels for options. The streams push level 1 every 10 ms, level 50 every 20 ms, level 200 every 100 ms and level 1,000 every 200 ms. Retail Price Improvement orders are excluded from both — they exist in the matching engine and are invisible over the API, so a reconstructed book will not reproduce every fill.

History depth is a property of the symbol, not of a plan. kline takes intervals from one minute to one month, up to 1,000 bars per page, and returns data back to the instrument's launch. Asking for BTC daily candles from before the beginning returns November 2018 on the inverse contract, March 2020 on the USDT perpetual and July 2021 on spot. Open interest is documented the same way: "the upper limit time you can query is the launch time of the symbol."

Tick data is a separate, and better, route. Bybit publishes per-symbol daily trade files as gzipped CSV on an open directory at public.bybit.com — no key, no account, no rate limit worth mentioning, with trading/, spot/, premium_index/ and spot_index/ trees. The BTCUSDT perpetual runs from 25 March 2020 to the previous day. Pulling four years of ticks out of recent-trade would be miserable; downloading it here is a loop over filenames.

Integrations

Bybit publishes its own clients for Python (pybit), Go, Rust, Ruby, JavaScript, PHP, Java and .NET under its GitHub organisation, and pybit is the one with real momentum — 5.17.0 was uploaded on 14 July 2026. The widely used bybit-api package on npm is not one of them: Bybit's own guide lists it as the "Community Node.js SDK", and the registry confirms it is published by Tiago Siebler rather than by the exchange. That is not a warning about the package, which is good; it is a warning against assuming a first-party support path that does not exist.

There is a first-party MCP server, bybit-exchange/trading-mcp, MIT-licensed and published to npm as bybit-official-trading-server (2.1.21, 17 September 2026). It covers the whole V5 surface, and the line that matters for this card is its own: all 22 market-data tools work with no API key at all. An agent can query prices, books, klines, funding and open interest from a config file holding no credentials.

Limitations

US and Mainland China IP addresses are blocked outright. Bybit's integration guide states it plainly: requests to the Bybit API from those addresses return 403 Forbidden. This is not an account restriction you can work around with a key — it happens before authentication, so a service running on US-hosted infrastructure cannot call these endpoints at all. For a large share of readers this single line decides the question. Whether the same block applies to the public.bybit.com file host is not documented and was not tested.

The API Terms are considerably more restrictive than "free, no key" suggests. Bybit's API Terms and Conditions, last updated 16 January 2026, grant "a limited, non-exclusive, non-sublicensable, non-transferable, non-assignable and revocable license" to use the APIs to develop, test and support your own use, and grant no rights over intellectual property in the content the APIs return. Three clauses then bite:

• you "shall not, under any circumstances … repackage or resell the services, or any part thereof, API or Service Data";
• you "shall not commercially exploit the APIs";
• you may not use the API "to monitor the availability, performance, or functionality" of the API or the service, "or for any similar benchmarking purposes" — which on its face covers the uptime dashboards and venue-latency comparisons this data is often collected for.

"Service Data" is defined as any data or information given by using the API, so the restrictions are drafted over the numbers and not only over the software. There is one genuine ambiguity: the document is written around API keys — it opens by telling you that you must verify your identity through a key before using an API — yet it scopes itself to "our API" with no carve-out for the unauthenticated endpoints. Nothing in seven pages says the public market routes are exempt. If your use is commercial, that is a question to put to Bybit in writing rather than one to resolve from the wording.

Caching and retention are simply not addressed. Neither the API Terms nor anything else reachable says how long you may keep the data or whether you may serve it from your own cache. Absent is not the same as permitted.

No news, no reference data beyond the instrument tables, no cross-venue anything. This is one exchange's view of its own markets. There is no consolidated price, no symbol mapping to other venues, and nothing at all about the chains the assets settle on.

The documentation reserves the right to be wrong. The API Terms state that Bybit may amend the use of the API without prior notice and "without updating the API Documentation". Treat the reference as current-but-unguaranteed, and pin nothing to a documented behaviour you have not re-checked.

Alternatives

The structural choice is venue-direct against aggregated. A multi-venue provider in the market data API category will give you Bybit's tape alongside forty others under one symbol scheme, and you pay for that in latency, in a normalisation layer you cannot inspect, and usually in money. Going direct costs you the normalisation work and the per-IP ceiling, and it removes the US-hosted deployment option entirely.

If what you actually want is the derivatives telemetry — funding, open interest, the long/short ratio — check what an aggregator carries before assuming it carries it. That is the part of this feed that is genuinely hard to get second-hand at full resolution.