Kaiko

Kaiko is an institutional-grade cryptocurrency market data provider that aggregates and normalizes price, volume, and order book data from 100+ exchanges. Unlike consumer-grade APIs, Kaiko delivers validated, exchange-native data at tick-level granularity—meaning every individual trade, every order book snapshot, and precise timing information that institutional traders depend on for accurate backtesting and live strategy execution. It's trusted by banks, hedge funds, market makers, and regulators for compliance, research, and high-fidelity market analysis.

Tick-level trade data
Every individual trade across 100+ exchanges with microsecond-level timestamps. No aggregation, no smoothing. Critical for detecting slippage, order flow dynamics, and market microstructure effects that surface only when you see the actual sequence of trades.

Order book snapshots
L2 order book depth at 10% and 1% liquidity levels, captured every 100 milliseconds. Reveals real liquidity conditions, spread dynamics, and depth erosion patterns that generic OHLCV candles miss entirely.

OHLCV & VWAP
Standard candle data paired with volume-weighted average price (VWAP) and time-weighted average price (TWAP) for each period. Essential for entry/exit modeling, especially when your strategy depends on volume profiles or mid-price calculations rather than simple closing prices.

Reference rates & fixing prices
Daily fixing prices, settlement rates, and institutional reference benchmarks used by major funds and indices. Useful if your strategy needs to align with standard institutional pricing or validate execution quality against known benchmarks.

Derivatives data
Funding rates for perpetual futures, open interest across contract types, and liquidation data. Directly applicable if you trade futures or perpetuals, or if you want to understand leverage-driven price dynamics and their impact on spot markets.

Exchange health & metadata
Volume rankings, pair counts, health scores, and exchange-specific metrics. Helps you identify which exchanges actually matter for liquidity in specific pairs and avoid low-quality or illiquid venues.

Historical depth
Data available from 2014 for major exchanges, allowing multi-year backtests on the same clean, normalized dataset.

100+ centralized exchanges (including major venues like Binance, Coinbase, Kraken, Bybit, OKX, and regional exchanges) with 50,000+ instrument pairs. Spot markets, futures, perpetuals, and options all covered. Historical records span nearly a decade for leading exchanges, enabling robust backtesting across bull and bear cycles.

Quantitative traders
Build statistical arbitrage, market microstructure, and cross-exchange strategies using precise tick-level data and order book depth. Detect fleeting edges that exist only for milliseconds and require unsmoothed, granular data.

Swing and position traders
Validate volume-based entries, understand real liquidity conditions during backtests, and stress-test strategies against realistic order book depth to estimate slippage and execution costs.

Algorithmic execution desks
Measure VWAP slippage, analyze how their execution algorithms performed relative to market benchmarks, and optimize order routing decisions across multiple venues.

Risk managers and compliance teams
Audit trading activity against institutional reference rates, detect market manipulation, and generate audit trails using normalized, validated data.

Strategy researchers
Backtest complex hypotheses involving order book imbalances, funding rate cycles, liquidation cascades, and exchange-specific microstructure that consumer APIs obscure.

Entry confirmation via order book depth
Your strategy signals a buy, but you want to check if the 1% order book depth is thick enough to absorb your position size without major slippage. Use Kaiko's L2 snapshots to validate liquidity at entry time and adjust position sizing or venue selection accordingly.

Cross-exchange arbitrage
Identify price discrepancies between two exchanges in your backtest. Kaiko's normalized, tick-synchronized data across 100+ venues lets you detect arbitrage windows, calculate real execution costs (spread + fees + slippage), and determine if the trade is actually profitable after all frictions.

Funding rate strategy validation
You want to test a strategy that shorts perpetuals on days when funding rates spike above a certain threshold. Kaiko's funding rate data lets you backtest this signal, correlate it with spot price movements, and measure whether the premium you collect covers your hedging costs.

Volume profile analysis
Build a strategy that enters when volume prints exceed a 20-day percentile threshold. Use Kaiko's granular VWAP and TWAP data to reconstruct volume profiles, test different thresholds, and see which timeframe and depth level actually predicts follow-through.

Liquidation cascade detection
Monitor open interest and liquidation data to detect when a market is primed for large cascades. Backtest strategies that fade or ride liquidations, using Kaiko's derivative data to identify high-leverage environments and mark price behavior.

Slippage modeling
For every backtest, use real order book depth from Kaiko to calculate actual slippage instead of assuming a fixed percentage. This reveals whether your strategy is actually profitable after realistic execution costs, or whether it's an illusion created by optimistic assumptions.

Kaiko data strengthens backtesting on StratBase.ai by replacing generic approximations with institutional-grade realism:

High-fidelity execution modeling
Rather than assuming a fixed slippage percentage, import Kaiko's L2 order book snapshots to StratBase.ai and simulate actual execution. Your backtest fills orders based on real liquidity levels that existed at the time you would have traded, not imaginary flat spreads.

Multi-venue venue selection
If your strategy should dynamically choose which exchange to trade on, feed Kaiko's exchange-specific volume, depth, and liquidity metrics into StratBase.ai. Test whether routing to the highest-volume venue beats your current static venue selection.

Microstructure signal validation
Test hypotheses like "when the L2 order book shows 3x more bids than asks, the next 1-hour return is positive." Kaiko's order book depth data lets you encode these signals precisely and measure edge over thousands of backtest windows.

Cross-asset correlation
Backtest strategies that depend on spot-futures spreads, funding rate cycles, or open interest shifts. Pull these correlated data streams from Kaiko into StratBase.ai to validate whether your multi-leg strategy actually works when all components move together realistically.

Regulatory and audit trails
Document every trade against Kaiko's reference rates and normalized pricing. Useful for compliance-sensitive strategies or if you need to explain your backtesting methodology to fund managers or regulators.

| Feature | Details | |---------|---------| | Base URL | https://us.market-api.kaiko.io | | Authentication | API key via request header | | Rate Limits | Tiered by subscription plan | | Response Format | JSON | | Delivery Methods | REST API for queries, WebSocket streaming for real-time, bulk download for historical extracts | | Latency | Microsecond-level timestamps on trades, 100ms snapshots on order books |

Kaiko operates on enterprise licensing with custom pricing. Quotations depend on data volume, historical depth, number of exchanges, refresh frequency, and delivery method. Plans typically begin at several hundred dollars per month for API access to major exchange data, scaling higher for real-time streaming, derivatives coverage, or extended historical extracts. Request a quote directly through their sales team for a proposal tailored to your backtest and research needs.

1. Request access at kaiko.com and describe your use case (backtesting, research, trading, compliance).
2. Complete onboarding to receive API credentials and documentation tailored to your subscription tier.
3. Test REST API with historical queries to validate data quality and coverage for your target exchanges and pairs.
4. Integrate with StratBase.ai by fetching Kaiko data into your backtesting environment, either via direct API calls or bulk downloads.
5. Enable real-time streaming (optional) if you need live market data for live strategy validation or production trading.

• Documentation
• Data Coverage & Exchange List
• Contact Sales
• API Reference