CoinGlass API

What it is

A REST API for crypto derivatives market structure: funding rates, open interest, liquidations, long/short ratios, taker flow, order-book depth and the liquidation heatmaps the vendor is known for. It is the paid, programmatic product behind a free web terminal; this card is the API, which has its own price list and a buyer who never opens the terminal.

The breadth is real. Open interest and funding come in OHLC candles per pair and aggregated across exchanges, stablecoin-margined and coin-margined separately. Liquidations come as per-pair history, coin-aggregated history, a raw order feed and three different heatmap models. Order flow includes cumulative volume delta, footprint charts, large resting orders and historical bid/ask depth within a price band. Around that sits a second catalogue that has nothing to do with derivatives: spot and ETF flows for five assets, exchange on-chain reserves and ERC-20 transfers, Bitcoin chain metrics such as NUPL and holder realised price, a set of house indices, and a news endpoint.

Hyperliquid gets unusual attention — whale alerts and positions above $1M notional, wallet positions by address and by coin, PnL distribution, long/short ratios by tag. If that venue is your subject, this is one of the few APIs that treats it as a first-class source rather than one more exchange in a list.

Pricing

Five plans, and the pricing page's big type is misleading in the usual way: it opens with the annual toggle already on, so "$29/mo" on the Hobbyist card is the annual rate. Month to month the ladder is $35, $95, $379 and $879, with Enterprise on request. Pay for a year and it becomes $348, $948, $3,588 and $8,388 — an effective $29, $79, $299 and $699 a month, and a saving of $72 to $2,160 a year. The FAQ calls that "a 20.5% discount"; the plan numbers make it 17% on Hobbyist and 21% on Professional, so do the arithmetic for your own tier.

What each step buys is worth reading carefully, because it is not what the headline suggests.

• Rate limit: 30, 80, 300 then 1200 requests a minute.
• Endpoint count: 80+, 130+, 150+, 160+. The increments are small and they hide which endpoints.
• Commercial use: Standard and up. The two cheap plans say personal use.
• History depth: this is the real ladder — see below.
• Freshness: identical on every plan. Every tier says updates within a minute, and each endpoint's own page says its cache interval applies "for all the API plans".

There is no free plan on the pricing page. The docs contradict themselves about whether any endpoint works without a key — the authentication page says all requests need one, the introduction says some do — and this card follows the price list.

Data & coverage

Options coverage is four venues and five endpoints. Deribit, Binance, OKX and Bybit, and what you get is open interest and trading volume by exchange, historical versions of both, max pain, and an options-to-futures open-interest ratio. Options Info refreshes every 30 seconds on every plan and max pain every minute. There is no implied volatility, no Greeks, no surface and no per-instrument chain. If your question is about an option's price, this is the wrong API; if it is about how large the options market got last week, the cheapest plan answers it.

Futures coverage is thirty venues, including the ones most aggregators skip: alongside Binance, OKX, Bybit, CME, Bitget, Deribit, BitMEX, Bitfinex, Gate, Kraken, KuCoin and HTX sit dYdX, Hyperliquid, Drift, Paradex, Aster, Lighter, EdgeX, Extended, ApeX Omni and tradeXYZ. Spot is eleven venues.

History depth is the plan ladder, and the cheap plans have no intraday data at all. The published matrix, by bar interval:

Read that against the marketing figure of 8+ years: the all-time claim is true on the daily row and on no other row. Twelve days is the deepest minute history anyone can buy off the shelf; Enterprise exists precisely because "custom history range" is the only way past it.

Update intervals are per endpoint and the same on every plan, which is the honest part of the model — you pay for reach and rate, not for freshness. Published examples: options open interest and volume every 30 seconds, max pain every minute, historical order-book bid/ask every 5 seconds, the raw liquidation order feed every second, and liquidation heatmaps, footprint and large resting orders in real time.

But several endpoints are gated by plan, and the docs state it per endpoint. The raw liquidation order feed, order-book heatmap and large open orders start at Standard. Liquidation heatmaps and footprint history — the two datasets the vendor is best known for — are Professional and Enterprise only. Hyperliquid whale positions start at Startup. Funding-rate and open-interest candles are on every plan. Check the endpoint page for the row you need before you pick a tier; the plan cards only give you a count.

Integrations

REST at the v4 base URL with a CG-API-KEY header, JSON everywhere, and two response headers that report your per-minute ceiling and current usage — so you can measure your own rate limit rather than infer it. An endpoint also reports your own plan and its expiry, which is more useful than it sounds when a key is shared across a team.

WebSocket streams exist for liquidation orders, spot and futures trades and futures ticker snapshots, at a separate host with the key in the query string, ping every 20 seconds. They start at the Standard plan — every stream page says so in red — so websockets are a Standard feature, two tiers above the cheapest key.

There is a first-party MCP server, marked beta, at the vendor's MCP host; it takes your API key in the client configuration and the docs carry setup instructions per client. Alongside it is an agent skill package published on GitHub, which the vendor suggests using together with the MCP server — the skill for interpreting the metrics, the server for fetching them. No webhooks.

Limitations

• No free tier on the price list, no documented trial, and no refunds — the pricing FAQ says so outright, "due to the nature of the API service". The free thing at this vendor is the web terminal, which is a different product.
• Nothing finer than a 4-hour bar on Hobbyist, or a 30-minute bar on Startup. If you are evaluating the cheap plans for intraday research, that single fact decides it, and it is one table below the plan cards rather than on them.
• The signature datasets need the Professional plan, $879 a month. Liquidation heatmaps and footprint charts are Professional and Enterprise only. Somebody arriving from the free heatmap on the website will find the API version four tiers up.
• Personal use below Standard. Two of the five plans forbid commercial use, and the terms of service separately prohibit copying, selling or redistributing the data without authorisation. Anything reader-facing is a Standard plan at least, plus a conversation.
• No implied volatility or Greeks anywhere. The options catalogue is five aggregate endpoints. For anything priced off a volatility surface you need a different provider.
• Documentation contradicts itself on whether a key is always required, which matters most to exactly the person trying to evaluate the thing before paying.
• The three liquidation heatmaps are three models, not three views. The docs name model1, model2 and model3 and describe all three identically, as levels "calculated based on market data and liquidation leverage levels". What separates them, and which one the website's chart uses, is not documented — so a number you publish from one of them is a number you cannot fully explain.

Alternatives

Laevitas API is the one to check against this card, because it has the thing this one does not: implied volatility, Greeks and a calibrated surface. It is also the more expensive door — a key starts at 500 dollars a month — so the two split cleanly by what you are measuring rather than by budget.

Coinalyze covers funding, open interest and liquidations for nothing, and its API history is a rolling window of one to two thousand points, which is the honest shape of a free derivatives feed. Hyblock Capital sells a narrower, more opinionated set of the same signals. Velo bundles a derivatives terminal with the API behind it, and Amberdata is the institutional version with options data attached.

The rest of the field is under crypto market data APIs.