Coinbase Exchange API

What it is

The public half of the Coinbase Exchange API — the REST and websocket surface at api.exchange.coinbase.com and ws-feed.exchange.coinbase.com that answers without credentials. Coinbase's own overview draws the line for you: trading APIs require authentication, "Market Data APIs provide market data and are public."

Which Coinbase API this is matters more than anything else on this page. Coinbase currently documents five things with confusingly similar names: this one, the Advanced Trade API behind the retail app, the Coinbase App account API, the International Exchange (INTX) API for perpetuals, and the Prime API for prime brokerage. They have different hosts, different auth schemes, different symbol formats and different data. The one described here is the institutional spot venue's API; it is the successor to the Pro API, which Coinbase marked deprecated in its Exchange changelog on 11 September 2024 with the instruction to use the Exchange API instead.

The venue is out of scope for this catalogue — we do not list places to trade. The data endpoint is in scope because it is published on its own terms, and in this case those terms are the most interesting thing about it.

Endpoints are unglamorous and complete for spot: all trading pairs, a single product, the order book at three levels of detail, candles, 24-hour and 30-day stats, the ticker, recent trades, volume across all products, and the currency reference tables.

Pricing

Nothing to pay and nothing to sign up for, on the public path. There is no pricing page for Coinbase Exchange market data because the data itself is not metered or sold to the person calling it.

The money is on the other side of the licence. Coinbase runs an authorized redistribution partner programme for anyone who needs to show the data to people outside their own organisation, with a published partner list that includes Amberdata, CCData, Coin Metrics, Kaiko, Lukka, Polygon.io and Tardis.dev among others. No price is published anywhere for becoming one or for buying from one; the only route Coinbase offers is a contact form. If your product displays a Coinbase price to a user, that is the tier you are actually on, and its cost is unknown until you ask.

Data & coverage

Spot only, on one venue. There is no funding endpoint, no open interest and no derivatives telemetry anywhere on this API — those live on Coinbase's separate INTX and derivatives products. As of 19 September 2026 the products endpoint returned 838 entries, but 323 of them carry trading_disabled: true, so the honest live count is a little over 500. That gap is the reason a "supported pairs" number from any venue is worth reading rather than quoting: delisted symbols stay in the reference data. Quote currencies are led by USD with 488 pairs, then USDT with 116, EUR with 87, BTC with 67 and GBP with 47.

Rate limits are per IP on the public side. Ten requests per second, bursting to fifteen, enforced with a lazy-fill token bucket that Coinbase documents in full including the arithmetic. Private endpoints get fifteen per second per profile. The websocket is throttled per IP as well — eight requests per second with bursts to twenty, and a hundred client messages per second. Ten a second is not much to share across a fleet, and the documentation says so indirectly by telling you not to poll the candle endpoint.

The free REST book is deeper than the free websocket, which is the reverse of what most people assume. GET /products/{id}/book?level=3 returns the entire non-aggregated, order-by-order book with no key — a multi-megabyte snapshot. On the websocket, though, the level2 channel carries an Authentication Required badge, as do level3 and full. What is open is level2_batch, which Coinbase documents as delivering the same level 2 data without authenticating, batched every 50 milliseconds. So the keyless real-time path is: level2_batch for depth, ticker per match or ticker_batch every five seconds, matches for the tape, plus heartbeat and status. That is enough to maintain a book; it is not tick-for-tick parity with what an authenticated client sees.

Candles are the weak spot. Six fixed granularities only — one minute, five, fifteen, one hour, six hours and one day — a hard maximum of 300 data points per request, and two caveats printed in the reference: "Historical rate data may be incomplete. No data is published for intervals where there are no ticks", and historical rates "should not be polled frequently". History does go back a long way: BTC-USD daily candles begin in July 2015, with nothing returned for dates before then. But 300 bars per call against a ten-a-second budget means backfilling a minute series across hundreds of pairs is a job measured in hours, and the gaps are real rather than zero-volume rows.

Integrations

Coinbase publishes a TypeScript SDK and a Go SDK for this API under its coinbase-samples organisation, along with an Exchange CLI for trying endpoints from a terminal, and the docs page describes all three as "open source, actively maintained". The dates disagree with the adjective: as of 19 September 2026 the last commit on the default branch was 27 May 2025 for the TypeScript SDK, 26 June 2025 for the Go SDK and 26 November 2024 for the CLI. The API is stable enough that this may not bite, but "actively maintained" is doing work the commit log does not support.

For latency-sensitive consumers there is a FIX 5.0 SP2 market data gateway offering L3 order-by-order, L2 top-ten and L1 top-of-book, on snapshot-enabled and snapshot-disabled ports. It uses the same authentication as FIX order entry — so it needs a Coinbase Exchange account and an API key, one connection per key — and FIX 5 sessions are logged out every Saturday at 1PM ET.

There is no first-party MCP server for this API. Coinbase does ship an MCP product, but it is a wallet and onchain-transaction server, a different product entirely.

Limitations

The redistribution clause is the headline, and it is stricter than most readers expect from a free public endpoint. The Exchange docs state that by accessing the Exchange market data API you agree to the Market Data Terms of Use. Those terms, last updated 7 August 2026, grant a "nonexclusive, nontransferable, non-sublicensable, revocable, limited license, solely for you and/or the officers and employees of your entity", and then say that use is "exclusively for you or your entity's personal or research purposes and may not be used to build an application intended for use by end users other than for you or your officers/employees."

Absent prior written consent, you may not redistribute, display or disseminate the data — or "any data, charts, analytics, research, or other works based on, referring to, or derived from" it — to any third party outside your organisation, by electronic means or otherwise. A separate clause forbids using the data or anything derived from it to build indexes, fixings, benchmarks, generic or fair-value prices, or valuations of any financial product.

A separate clause bars feeding the data to a model. You may not use Market Data, or permit a third party to use it, to "develop, train, fine-tune, teach, validate, benchmark, or otherwise improve any artificial intelligence or machine learning model, algorithm, chatbot, agent, or other automated system, whether generative or non-generative, or for any other purpose related to the research, development, or operation of artificial intelligence technologies." That is drafted wide enough to reach evaluation runs and agent demos, not only training corpora, and it is the clause most likely to surprise someone who reached this card from an agent framework.

Read plainly, the restrictions rule out a public price page, a chart in a consumer app, a free API that proxies the numbers, and an index built on the Coinbase tape. Internal dashboards, research and your own trading are inside the grant. Commercial display is a conversation with Coinbase's partner team, not a matter of attribution.

Caching and retention are not addressed at all. The Market Data Terms say nothing about how long you may store what you pulled, in either direction. Absent is not permitted.

Spot only, and one venue only. No perpetuals, no futures, no funding, no open interest, no options. No onchain data of any kind. If the pair you need is not listed on Coinbase Exchange it does not exist here, and the 323 trading_disabled products are a reminder that delisting is routine.

Order-book parity requires an account. The strongest streaming channels — level2, level3 and full — are key-gated, as is the lower-latency ws-direct feed and the FIX gateway. Keys are created on the Coinbase Exchange site and scoped to a profile. Whether an individual can open such an account, as against an institution, is not something the documentation settles, and the signup flow could not be inspected.

The candle endpoint is documented as lossy. Missing intervals are not zeros, they are absent, and you will not be told which are which. Anything that assumes a contiguous series has to reindex.

Alternatives

The trade-off here is not really about features, it is about the licence. Any multi-venue provider in the market data API category that lists Coinbase among its sources is, if it is doing this properly, an authorized redistributor — which means buying from one of them is the supported way to put a Coinbase price in front of a user, and the price difference is what the licence costs.

Going direct is the right answer for research, for your own trading, and for anything that stays inside your organisation. It is the wrong answer the moment a third party sees the number.