CoinDesk Data API

What it is

The market-data API that was CryptoCompare's, then CCData's, and is now CoinDesk's. One REST and websocket surface over aggregated spot prices, per-exchange OHLCV, futures and options including open interest, funding rates and liquidations, index and reference-rate values, DEX swaps, block-level on-chain data for six chains, asset metadata, social history and a news feed — all under one key with one instrument-mapping scheme.

Its distinguishing asset is depth of aggregate history rather than breadth of protocol. If you are valuing a portfolio, reconstructing a price on a date for tax or audit, or backtesting against a consolidated print rather than a single venue's tape, that is what this is bought for.

Three things moved with the acquisition, and all three will break an old integration:

• The brand. CCData is retired; ccdata.io redirects to the CoinDesk Data site. CryptoCompare survives as a retail site, now labelled "Powered By CoinDesk Data". Anything you have that says CCData is describing a name that no longer exists.
• The documentation. It is on the CoinDesk developer portal now, where the Min API reference is still published alongside the new one. The old CryptoCompare docs URL is not redirected to it — that address answers the API's own 401 error.
• The free tier. Gone, on a date the vendor named. See below.

Pricing

There are no numbers on the pricing page. Three plans are listed — Personal, Start-Up, Enterprise — and the first is an application and the other two are "Contact". The old self-service pricing page at the CryptoCompare address does not exist either: it 301s to the legacy API host, which answers 401 API key required. Whatever you paid before, there is no published rate to compare against now.

What the three plans differ on, per the plan cards:

• Personal — non-commercial only, under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 licence, aggregate data over REST only, capped lifetime calls with no figure attached to the cap, 365 days of daily history, 7 days of hourly, 1 hour of minute. Support is the FAQ page.
• Start-Up — a commercial licence for internal use, aggregate plus per-exchange OHLC, REST and websocket, 365 days daily, 30 days hourly, 24 hours of minute data, email support.
• Enterprise — bespoke licence, aggregate plus trade plus order book, spot, DEX and derivatives, on-chain and asset metadata and sentiment, 10+ years of history, 24/7 Slack and email, delivery to S3, Azure Blob or BigQuery, FIX connectivity and an SLA.

The vendor's own pages disagree about whether the free plan still issues a working key, and this card does not paper over it. The pricing page lists Personal, and the API introduction still tells you that "most endpoints are available on the free tier". Against that, a vendor announcement dated 17 April 2026 says that as of 21 May 2026 the free API tier was retired and accounts without a subscription would no longer have API access — in its words, current access "will stop returning data". The Excel add-in documentation, separately, tells new users to email the data team for an account. The dated announcement is the most specific of the four, so this card records the free tier as gone; confirm with a key before planning around a Personal plan.

Data & coverage

Vendor figures — 300+ centralised and decentralised exchanges, 10,000+ coins, 300,000+ trading pairs, 99.99% API uptime over 90 days. Those are counts of integrations, not of venues currently producing prints, and the vendor does not publish a per-exchange coverage table the way some of its competitors do, so the count cannot be taken apart from outside.

History depth is claimed two different ways on two vendor pages: the data site says the archive dates back to 2010, and the API introduction says "we've been doing this since January 2013". Three years is a meaningful difference for anything that touches Bitcoin's early history, and nothing on either page reconciles it. Ask for the oldest timestamp you need at the granularity you need it, and do not plan against either number.

Aggregation is the thing to understand before comparing a price to anyone else's. The legacy aggregate index is CCCAGG; the current reference-rate markets in the API include cadli and ccix. A number from an aggregate and a number from a named exchange's tape are not the same figure, and which one an endpoint returns depends on the market parameter you pass.

On-chain coverage is block-level and specific: there are block endpoints for Ethereum, BNB Smart Chain, Bitcoin, Base, Arbitrum and Solana, plus address and supply data and DEX swap and liquidity-update feeds. The vendor describes the wider reach as "Bitcoin, Ethereum and other EVM chains", which is broader than the six the documentation names.

Real-time is qualified rather than claimed: the introduction says live data "may have slight latency (under 100ms)". Rate limits are counted in calls, not credits — every call costs one regardless of what it returns — and they are enforced per account, not per API key. Extra keys buy you separate usage statistics and nothing else; the vendor's own advice for isolating dev from production is to open a second account. Limits are exposed across five windows (second, minute, hour, day, month) in X-Ratelimit-Limit and its companions.

Integrations

REST and websocket, JSON on every endpoint and CSV on most. There is an official Excel add-in on the Microsoft store with more than fifty =CD. functions, including streaming price cells.

There is a first-party MCP server, distributed as a connector rather than a URL you configure by hand: you authenticate it with a CoinDesk Data API key and it exposes spot, futures, options, indices, news and order-book data. The endpoint is live — an unauthenticated POST to mcp.coindesk.com/mcp answers 401 and advertises OAuth protected-resource metadata.

No first-party SDK is named anywhere in the documentation, and there are no links to a source repository on it. The obvious package is not the vendor's: cryptocompare on PyPI is a third-party wrapper published under an individual's account, not by CryptoCompare, CCData or CoinDesk. If you install it, you are depending on a volunteer's tracking of an API that has just changed hands.

Limitations

No price is published for anything you would actually buy. Both commercial plans are quoted on request, so this cannot be compared on cost against a vendor that prints its rates, and a budget cannot be sized without a sales conversation.

The free tier was retired on 21 May 2026, which is the single most important fact for anyone arriving from a tutorial, a StackOverflow answer or an old side project. The keyless min-api.cryptocompare.com calls that half the crypto tutorials on the internet still print do not work either: the endpoint answers 401 and asks for a key.

The legacy host is deprecated on an undated clock. min-api.cryptocompare.com still routes and still answers, and streamer.cryptocompare.com still responds. The API introduction says the Min API "is considered deprecated and, as of November 2023, it will not be receiving any new updates", but no sunset date for either host appears on any vendor page. The deprecation policy page itself lists only v1 endpoints of the new host and promises deprecated endpoints "at least several months to a few years", so the number attached to the old API is a freeze date, not an end date.

The old documentation moved without a redirect. min-api.cryptocompare.com/documentation returns the API's 401 error, not a page and not a forward. The Min API reference is still published, on the new portal at /documentation/legacy, so an old integration can be checked against its spec — but only by someone who knows to look there.

Personal is non-commercial and attribution-bound. CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 means share-alike as well as non-commercial; the older CryptoCompare guide, still published, required free-account users to credit the source in their application.

Two vendor pages disagree about history depth (2010 versus 2013) and one of them has to be wrong. Treat neither as a commitment.

Alternatives

If the reason you are here is that a CryptoCompare key stopped working, the honest first question is whether you need an aggregate at all. Exchange-native APIs are free and give you the venue's own tape; what an aggregator sells is the consolidated print, the symbol mapping and the archive, and only the third of those is hard to replace.

Against CoinAPI, the trade is legible pricing versus breadth of dataset: CoinAPI prints a full rate card and a self-serve metered plan but has no news, no social and no chain-state endpoints, while this has all three under one key and no published price at all. The rest of the field is in Crypto Market Data APIs.