ccapi

What it is

A header-only C++17 library for streaming order books and sending orders straight from your process to the exchange, with nothing of the vendor's in between. It is the answer to the same question CCXT answers — one interface over many venues — asked by somebody for whom a Python round trip is too slow.

The API deliberately imitates Bloomberg's: a Session, Subscription and Request/Event model rather than a method per endpoint. That is an acquired taste and it is also the reason the surface stays the same across thirty venue identifiers and across six languages, because the venue is a string and the operation is an enum.

The build is where the C++ shows. Header-only, C++17, OpenSSL, plus Boost 1.87.0 and RapidJSON 1.1.0 as includes, and hffix 1.4.1 if you want FIX. Services and venues are switched on with compiler macros — CCAPI_ENABLE_SERVICE_MARKET_DATA, CCAPI_ENABLE_SERVICE_EXECUTION_MANAGEMENT, CCAPI_ENABLE_EXCHANGE_BYBIT — so what you compile is only what you use, and the project's own performance advice is to enable nothing else.

Liveness, in dates: release v7.11.0 landed on 20 October 2026, adding the bitget-uta identifier, after v7.10.2 on 16 September, v7.10.1 on 7 August and v7.10.0 on 2 August. The licence is MIT from the LICENSE file on master, "Copyright (c) Crypto Chassis". master is the stable branch and the default one; develop carries experimental work and the merges into master are how releases happen.

Pricing

Free, MIT, nothing to buy — and no pricing page to check, because the vendor no longer has a website. cryptochassis.com does not resolve at all; its MX records still point at Zoho, so the hello@cryptochassis.com address in the README may still work, but there is no page behind the brand.

What the README does sell is the people: "hire us as engineers, liquidity providers, traders, or asset managers". That is a services business beside the library rather than a tier of it, and nothing in the repository is gated behind it.

The other money on this page is the usual one for this category. Most exchange names in the README's supported-venue list are referral links — Binance, Bitget, Bybit, Crypto.com, Gate.io, HTX, OKX. It does not change what the code does; it does explain the venue list.

Data & coverage

Thirty-one venue identifiers for market data, as the README read on 25 October 2026: ascendex, binance, binance-usds-futures, binance-coin-futures, bitfinex, bitget, bitget-futures, bitget-uta, bitmart, bitmex, bitstamp, bybit, coinbase, cryptocom, deribit, erisx, gateio, gateio-perpetual-futures, gemini, huobi, huobi-usdt-swap, huobi-coin-swap, hyperliquid, kraken, kraken-futures, kucoin, kucoin-futures, mexc, mexc-futures, okx and whitebit. Twenty-nine of those also take orders — the two that do not are mexc-futures and whitebit. FIX exists on three: Binance, Coinbase and Gemini.

Three identifiers on that list have nothing behind them now. AscendEX stopped trading on 1 July 2026, BitMart on 26 August and BitMEX on 23 September. ascendex, bitmart and bitmex were all still in the README on 25 October 2026, after release v7.11.0 of 20 October had added bitget-uta. Code written against them will compile and find no market there.

Read that list as identifiers rather than as exchanges. Binance is three entries, Huobi three, Gate.io two, and a venue's spot and futures arms are separate compile-time targets with separate capabilities. Counting companies rather than identifiers gives a number in the low twenties.

There is no history and no storage. Subscriptions carry order-book depth you specify, trades, and candlesticks in two flavours — calculated from trades by the library, or taken from the exchange's own endpoint — delivered either immediately or in batches when you are archiving rather than trading. Anything the unified surface does not model can be sent through the generic public and private request paths, which hand you the venue's raw endpoint with the signing done for you.

Integrations

Bindings for five other languages, built by you. Python, Java, C#, Go and JavaScript are generated with SWIG and CMake — cmake -DBUILD_PYTHON=ON -DBUILD_VERSION=1.0.0 .. — and the artefacts land under binding/build/<language>/packaging/<version>. There is no published wheel, gem or npm package; the build is the install.

Hyperliquid needs extra work. Execution there links secp256k1 and msgpack, and orders address the instrument by Hyperliquid's numeric asset id rather than by symbol — Request(CREATE_ORDER, "hyperliquid", "0") is an order on BTC — with client order ids that must satisfy the venue's own format or be rejected.

Limitations

The obvious install command installs somebody else's package. pip install ccapi gets version 0.1.0 by Achilles Rasquinha, a "Python API for Cell Collective", pointing at an unrelated repository. It installs cleanly, so nothing errors; it is simply not this. npm has no ccapi at all. For a library whose selling point is bindings in five languages, the absence of a published package in any of them is the single biggest cost of using it.

No backtester, no paper trading, no simulation. This is a connector and an execution surface. There is no sandbox switch in the API, so rehearsal means whatever testnet the venue itself provides, reached by overriding the exchange URL.

No unified derivatives analytics. Perpetual and futures venues are supported as venues, but there is no cross-venue funding rate, open interest or liquidation call in the unified surface the way CCXT has one — those go through the generic request path, which means parsing the venue's own response yourself.

Compile-time coupling cuts both ways. Adding a venue means a rebuild, and the README's troubleshooting section is a list of what goes wrong when you do: object files too big for the assembler, string table overflows, OpenSSL not found on three operating systems. Tested platforms are Clang on macOS, GCC on Linux and MinGW on Windows.

One known venue quirk is documented and will still bite you. ccapi uses a microsecond unix timestamp as the nonce, so a Kraken key needs a nonce window configured — 500,000 gives half a second of tolerance — or authenticated calls fail with invalid-nonce errors.

The vendor has no public presence beyond the repository. No website, no status page, no changelog outside the release tags, and a Discord and a Medium account as the support channel. The code is current; the company around it is not visible.

Alternatives

CCXT is the default and the honest comparison: more venues, eight language builds that are actually published, a release most days, and a Python or TypeScript process in the path. Choose ccapi when that last clause is the problem and you are prepared to pay for it in build complexity.

For a single venue in C++, the venue's own FIX or REST documentation is one dialect with no abstraction between you and it — and ccapi's FIX support covers only Binance, Coinbase and Gemini, so on most venues that is what the comparison actually is.

Barter is the Rust answer to the same latency argument, with eight data venues — seven still trading — and no live execution client at all. Hummingbot is what people build on top of a layer like this when they would rather not; the rest of the trading bots and execution SDKs listing is the same trade-off at different heights.