DEX Screener

What it is

The default screener for decentralised-exchange pairs. You pick a chain, sort a table of pools by volume, liquidity, age or price change, and open a pair to get a candle chart, the transaction counts, buy and sell volume split by side, pooled balances and the pair's age. On 2026-09-19 the chain rail listed 64 chains, ordered by volume, from Solana and Robinhood at the top down to Polkadot and Step Network at the bottom.

The product is not a data vendor with a UI attached. DEX Screener's FAQ says the platform runs its own indexer over raw chain logs and uses no external APIs or data sources, which is unusual for a screener and is the reason a new chain appears here before it appears in most aggregators. What it does not do is sell that feed — the API exists and it is free, but there is no data plan to buy and no history product, which is what keeps this a screening tool rather than a market-data API.

Around the table sit the things people actually keep it open for: a watchlist, price alerts, multicharts, a new-pairs feed, gainers and losers, and a board of "metas" — narrative buckets like Cat, Dog, AI and Brainrot with a market cap attached to each, curated by hand by moderators and community members.

The charts are not DEX Screener's own. The pair page loads charting_library.js in an iframe and carries a visible "Crypto charts by TradingView" attribution, and the vendor's documentation has a page devoted to explaining TradingView Advanced Charts as the engine behind them. The practical consequence is that the drawing tools, indicator list and chart behaviour are TradingView's and move on TradingView's schedule.

Pricing

Nothing costs the reader anything. There is no sign-in wall on the screener, no key on the API and no paid tier in front of the charts. That is worth stating plainly rather than calling it a generous free tier, because it is not a tier — it is the whole product.

The money comes from token teams, and the vendor publishes the rates. Enhanced Token Info, which puts a project's logo, description and socials on its own token page, is listed at $299 against a struck-through $499. Banner advertising starts at $299. A slot on the trending bar starts at $2,000, in packages from 24 hours to a week, rotated with up to five other advertisers on the same chain. A custom direct deal carries a fixed minimum budget of $100,000 and requires the advertiser to pass KYC. Boosts are sold from the token page itself in packs lasting 12 to 24 hours, and 500 active Boosts turn the ticker gold; the vendor does not publish a Boost price list anywhere we could reach, so this card gives none.

All of that is disclosed by DEX Screener rather than dug out, and the refund policy names exactly three paid products — Enhanced Token Info, Token Advertising and Community Takeover — with a 14-day window and refunds batched weekly.

Data & coverage

Coverage is pool-level and spot-only. There are no perpetuals, no funding or open interest, and no centralised-exchange tape; a token that trades mostly on a CEX will look thinner here than it is. Listing is automatic — a token appears as soon as it is in a pool with one transaction, and on a supported chain every DEX is tracked whether or not it was ever requested. New chains go through a Discord request judged on liquidity, volume, audited code, a bridge and community.

The numbers on a token page are computed, and the formula is published: FDV is total supply minus burned supply times price, and market cap falls back to a self-reported circulating supply taken from paid Enhanced Token Info or from CoinGecko when a project does not burn. That means two of the most quoted figures on the page depend on what the project itself submitted.

The API is the same data without the chrome. /latest/dex/pairs, /tokens/v1, /token-pairs/v1 and /latest/dex/search allow 300 requests a minute; the promotional endpoints — token profiles, boosts, orders, ads, metas — allow 60. No key is needed; an unauthenticated search returned live pairs on 2026-09-19. The WebSocket API exists but carries only token profiles, community takeovers, ads and boosts. There is no price or trade channel in it.

Integrations

There is no MCP server, no SDK named in the documentation and no webhook. The documented integration surface is the REST API, the WebSocket metadata streams, and the iOS and Android apps. The FAQ suggests building your own bot against the free API when asked about Discord bots, which is a fair summary of the position.

The API terms are worth reading before you build on it. They are dated 18 August 2023 and grant a revocable, non-transferable licence; resale and redistribution are prohibited outright, and you may not use the API to build a product whose primary purpose competes with DEX Screener. Section 4 refers to a paid version of the API chosen "during the API Services checkout stage", and the documentation's advance-notice guarantees — 30 days for breaking changes, three months before an endpoint is discontinued — apply to paying customers. We found no checkout and no plan table; the published reference documents keyless access only. If your project depends on the API not changing under you, that asymmetry is the risk.

Limitations

No history and no candles over the API. The published REST surface has no OHLCV endpoint. You can read a pair's current state and its 5-minute to 24-hour deltas, and that is all. Anything that needs a time series has to be built by polling and storing it yourself, or bought elsewhere.

The WebSocket does not stream prices. Every documented channel carries promotional metadata. A reader who assumes "WebSockets" on the API page means a live trade feed will discover otherwise after writing the client.

Paid products feed the ranking, and the vendor says so. The Trending Score is a blend of market activity, page visits, community reactions and trust signals, and the vendor states that Boost packs apply a multiplier to it, that trending-bar ads help it, and that tokens with Enhanced Token Info get a lift. None of that is hidden, but it means the trending list is a measure of attention, some of it bought, on a surface whose entire content is tokens minted hours ago. Ads also render inside the listing and on the pair page. Treat presence on the screen as evidence of nothing.

No moderation, by design. The FAQ says data is processed in real time "without any human moderation or intervention". That is the honest trade for indexing everything, and it is why the audit flags on the page come from third-party partners rather than from DEX Screener.

Spot DEX pools only. No CEX prices, no derivatives, no order books, no wallet or holder analytics beyond the counts on the pair page.

The site is hard to reach from a script. A Cloudflare challenge stands in front of dexscreener.com that plain HTTP clients and headless browsers do not pass. The API host and the documentation host answer normally, so this affects scraping rather than integration — but it does mean the app cannot be monitored the way an ordinary page can.

Alternatives

GeckoTerminal covers far more networks — 228 against 64 — and, unlike this, publishes an OHLCV endpoint, which is the single biggest functional difference between the two. DEXTools is the older tool and the one with an in-app swap and a perpetuals screen, at the cost of a premium ladder gated on holding its own token. The rest of the field sits in Crypto Charting Platforms & Libraries; if what you want is the numbers rather than the screen, start from Crypto Market Data APIs instead.