Kaiko Market Data API

What it is

Kaiko sells normalised crypto market data to institutions on an enterprise contract — tick trades, order books, OHLCV, derivatives reference and risk data, fair-value pricing and regulated benchmarks, delivered three ways: a REST API for history and snapshots, a gRPC stream for live data, and a once-a-day drop into your own S3, Azure Blob, GCS, Snowflake or BigQuery. The company was founded in 2014, says its indices arm is a BMR-registered benchmark administrator, and says it serves 200+ enterprise clients.

The thing that makes it awkward to shop for is that "Kaiko" is not one subscription. The data dictionary ties every dataset to a named product — Level 1 & Level 2 Data, Reference Data, Derivatives Risk Indicators, Kaiko Fair Market Value, Market Explorer, Blockchain Monitoring, Portfolio & Risk Management — and inside several of those, to a named tier. This card covers the market-data side of that list. The indices business and the research desk are separate purchases.

Kaiko announced the acquisition of Amberdata on 2 June 2026. As of 19 September 2026 the two are still sold as two products: separate sites, separate documentation hubs, separate API hosts and separate contracts, and kaiko.com's product menu does not list an Amberdata product.

Pricing

There is no published price and no self-serve path. The pricing page says plans are built per client on "number of assets/instruments, data type, granularity, historical vs. live access, and usage", and the only actions on it are requesting a quote, requesting a trial and reading the standard licensing agreement. A trial exists; its length is not published anywhere we could find.

There is no free tier. The documentation is explicit that every request needs a key and that the key comes from the Kaiko team against an active subscription — there is no form that hands you one against an email address. Budget for a sales cycle before you can write a line of code against it.

Data & coverage

Tick trades and OHLCV go back to 2010 on REST, for centralised spot, centralised derivative and DeFi spot markets, at granularities from one second to one day. That depth is the product.

Order-book depth is where the marketing and the data dictionary part company, and it is worth reading the table before signing:

• Full order book — not on REST at all. Live on the stream with 72 hours of replay, or a once-a-day CSV in cloud delivery with history from August 2023, centralised spot only.
• Top of book — cloud history from December 2022.
• Derived metrics (bid-ask spread, market depth, price slippage) — REST carries a one-month rolling window only. The raw snapshots those are computed from go back to 2015 in cloud delivery, varying by exchange. Depth is computed from a snapshot every 30 seconds.

Derivatives cover future, perpetual-future and option instrument classes, with funding rates on perpetuals and open interest on all three. Contract details start July 2020, implied-volatility surfaces and smiles April 2021 at one-minute granularity, and liquidation events only from 8 January 2025. Supply and market-cap metrics start mid-September 2025.

On-chain, Kaiko Blockchain Monitoring covers Bitcoin, Ethereum and Solana — native transfers, token transfers, staking deposits and withdrawals, gas — back to each chain's genesis, with one exception that matters: Solana ships 30 days of rolling history in a standard package, and inception-to-date is a custom deal. The BigQuery copy of this data runs roughly 15 minutes behind live, deliberately, so that reorgs do not land in your warehouse.

The stream is gRPC, with live data plus 72 hours of replay. It is a live channel, not a history channel, and the docs say so.

Integrations

REST authenticates with an X-Api-Key header and is limited to 6,000 requests per minute per API key; past that it returns 429. The limit is per key, not per IP.

Kaiko publishes stream SDK examples on GitHub for C++, C#, Go, Java, Node, Python, Rust and Scala, linked from its own quick-start page. Cloud delivery writes gzipped CSV once a day to AWS S3, Azure Blob or Google Cloud Storage; Snowflake and BigQuery are offered as a daily refresh or in near real time. There is no MCP server — the term appears nowhere in the documentation index.

Limitations

Nothing about this product is self-serve. No price, no free tier, no key against an email address. If you are evaluating four providers in an afternoon, three of them will have answered before Kaiko has replied to the form.

The stream is not an archive. Seventy-two hours of replay is a reconnection buffer, not a backfill. Anything older comes from REST or from a cloud drop, and for full order-book depth it comes only from the cloud drop.

Order-book history is much younger than trade history. Trades to 2010 sits on the same page as a full book from August 2023 and a one-month rolling window on the REST spread and depth endpoints. If your research needs depth across the 2021 cycle, the answer is the 2015-onward snapshot archive in cloud delivery, not the API.

Solana is 30 days deep unless you pay for more, which is the kind of detail that only appears in a footnote on the coverage page.

The documentation publishes no exchange count. The coverage pages hand you an instrument explorer and a reference-data endpoint instead of a number. That is more honest than most, but it means you cannot compare Kaiko against a competitor's "200+ exchanges" without doing the count yourself — and you need access to do it.

Coverage claims are tier claims. Almost every row in the data dictionary names the subscription and tier it belongs to. A dataset being listed under Kaiko does not mean it is on the plan you were quoted.

Alternatives

Amberdata is the closest comparison in this catalogue on data breadth, and since June 2026 it is also owned by Kaiko — but it is still sold separately, and it is the one of the two that will sell you a single exchange's feed online with a credit card. If what you need is one venue's spot tape rather than a normalised cross-venue product, start there. If what you need is a benchmark administrator's fair value, or tick data from before 2013, this is the one.