CoinMarketCap API

What it is

CoinMarketCap's data API — the commercial product behind the rankings site, sold to people writing software rather than to people looking at a screen. Eight endpoint families: cryptocurrency quotes and listings, exchanges, global metrics, DEX data, trending and content feeds, the CMC 20 and CMC 100 indices, and the x402 and MCP routes for agents.

The vendor's headline numbers differ from page to page: the documentation says 14 years of history, 51M+ tracked assets, 947+ exchanges and 72+ endpoints, while the API landing page says 16 years, 50 million+ tokens, 941+ exchanges and 92 endpoints. The endpoint count at least reconciles — the pricing page's own plan data counts 63 endpoints on the free Basic tier rising to 92 on Enterprise — and those per-plan figures are the ones worth planning against.

What you get is breadth and a stable identifier layer rather than depth of microstructure: there are no order books, and the free and entry tiers carry no OHLCV endpoints at all.

Pricing

Six plans, and the pricing page's big type is misleading in a specific way: the figure shown as "$29/mo" on the Builder card is the annual-billing rate. Month-to-month, the ladder is $35, $95, $375 and $875, with Basic free and Enterprise quoted. The numbers above are month-to-month; the annual equivalents are $29, $79, $299 and $699 and are named in each tier note.

Metering is by data points returned, not by request — typically one credit per 100 data points. That makes the credit allowances comparable to each other but not to a vendor that counts calls: 150,000 credits is not 150,000 requests unless every request returns fewer than 100 rows.

Per plan: 15,000 credits a month and 50 requests a minute free; 150,000 and 300 on Builder; 450,000 and 600 on Startup; 2,000,000 and 750 on Growth; 5,000,000 and 1,200 on Professional. Keys per plan run 1, 1, 10, 15 and 25. Currency conversions are capped per call at 1, 8, 40, 40 and 80 respectively — a detail that bites anyone quoting a portfolio in several fiats, because the cheap tiers force you into extra calls to do it.

The free Basic tier includes commercial use rights, which is unusual and is the strongest thing on this page. The licence is limited to one product with up to 100,000 users and forbids redistributing or reselling the data as a standalone service.

Data & coverage

Refresh is 60 seconds on Basic and Builder and real-time on Startup and above. The websocket appears at Startup with 10 connections and 100 subscriptions; below that there is no streaming at all, so "real-time" on the cheap tiers means a value recomputed every minute.

History is the sharpest tier boundary. Daily quotes go back one year on Basic, three years on Builder and to 2010 from Startup upward; intraday quotes give one month on the first three tiers, three months on Growth, twelve on Professional and the full series only on Enterprise. Exchange quote history behaves the same way against a 2018 floor, and rankings history against 2013. OHLCV — latest and historical alike — does not exist below Startup.

Derivatives are unusually well distributed: derivative exchanges, derivative market pairs by cryptocurrency and by exchange, and three liquidation endpoints are available on every tier including the free one, as are the Fear and Greed index, the Altcoin Season index and the CMC 20 and CMC 100 index endpoints.

The DEX side covers token lookup and batch queries, pools, liquidity, swap history, K-line candles and holder analytics — holder counts, holder lists, tagged cohorts such as sniper, dev, whale and bot wallets, and top-10/50/100 concentration ratios. Pair endpoints can return a Go+ security scan as an aux field. Conversion targets cover 93 fiat currencies and four precious metals.

A keyless public API at /public-api exposes roughly 35 production endpoints with no account, which is enough to check a response shape before signing up.

Integrations

Official SDKs exist and are current: coinmarketcap-sdk on PyPI and @coinmarketcap/sdk on npm, both at 4.0.3 in September 2026, both published by CoinMarketCap accounts. The bare PyPI name coinmarketcap is not theirs — it is a third-party wrapper last released in 2018, and installing it by reflex is the easy mistake here.

The MCP server is official, read-only and exposes 12 tools covering quotes, technical analysis, holder and supply metrics, global metrics, derivatives, trending narratives, macro events, news and semantic search. It authenticates with an API key in a header. A second endpoint takes no key and charges 0.01 USDC per tool call over the x402 protocol, at 30 calls a minute per wallet.

There are no webhooks. Browser-side calls are not supported at all — the API has no CORS headers by design, so every integration needs a server or proxy in front of it.

Limitations

No OHLCV on the free or entry tier. If you are backfilling candles, the entry price is Startup at $95 a month month-to-month, not Builder at $35.

No order books, and no trade-by-trade tape for centralized venues. Derivative market pairs are listed but the API pages do not say whether they carry perpetuals, expiring futures or both, nor whether funding rate or open interest is exposed — so treat the derivatives coverage as venue and liquidation data until you have read the endpoint reference for the contract you care about.

The supported DEX network list is not published anywhere outside the API, and the endpoint that would return it demands a key. Ethereum, Solana, Base, Arbitrum and Polygon are confirmed supported network slugs against the keyless pair endpoint; a BNB Chain slug could not be found under any of the obvious spellings, which does not prove it is missing, only that the vendor does not tell you.

The vendor's own pages disagree about the free tier. The MCP page states that a free Basic key includes 30 calls a minute and 10,000 monthly credits; the pricing page and its underlying plan data both say 50 requests a minute and 15,000 credits. Plan against the pricing page, and expect the lower figure to be what a support ticket quotes back at you.

The commercial licence covers one product with up to 100,000 users and bars redistribution, which makes this a poor fit if your product is a data service. Community and content endpoints — trending topics, posts, news — start at Growth, $375 a month month-to-month.

Alternatives

The obvious counterpart is CoinGecko's API, which meters in credits per call rather than per 100 data points, streams from its $35 tier rather than its $95 one, and publishes a network count for its onchain data — but caps free history at 365 days and requires attribution on every plan. Both sit alongside the rest of the field in Crypto Market Data APIs.