Who Kaiko is
Kaiko is a crypto market data company founded in 2014, with offices in Paris, London, New York and Singapore. It collects trades and order books from centralised exchanges, and trading data from decentralised ones, and turns them into data feeds, analytics and benchmark reference rates. Its benchmarks, Kaiko Indices, are administered in line with the IOSCO Principles for Financial Benchmarks.
Banks, asset managers and exchanges are among its clients, using its data for trading, valuation and risk management. That institutional focus, and reference rates built for valuation, are why it is one of the crypto data providers our market data module connects to.
What it does in your platform
Market data
Supplies crypto trades, top-of-book quotes and reference rates. The module turns them into the quotes, candles and history your apps show, and can use a Kaiko rate as the reference price for valuations.
How the connection works
One connector in the market data module talks to Kaiko: Kaiko Stream, over gRPC, for live data, and the REST API for history. The API key stays in the platform's secrets, and your apps read prices from the platform, never from Kaiko.
Assets are mapped
Each asset you list is tied to Kaiko's codes for the exchanges and pairs it trades on, or to a reference rate where you want one price across venues.
The stream opens
The module subscribes on Kaiko Stream to trades, best bids and asks, and the reference rates you use. Reference rate streams can replay recent values after a reconnect.
History fills the charts
OHLCV and VWAP aggregations from the REST API back the candles, so a chart has history from its first view.
Every tick is checked
The module filters out bad ticks and compares Kaiko with your other sources, then publishes one price per asset to your apps, charts, the FX module and the risk checks.
Silence is caught
If the stream goes quiet, prices fail over to the next source, and an asset with no fresh price is flagged instead of showing a stale number.
Next to other providers
The module combines Kaiko with aggregators such as CoinGecko and CoinMarketCap and with exchange feeds, and fails over to the next source when one goes quiet. Where your own order books are liquid, their prices lead and Kaiko fills the gaps.
The prices your apps show belong to the module, not to a vendor. Adding a source next to Kaiko, or replacing it later, changes the configuration, not your apps.
When Kaiko fits best
A strong fit when
- You need crypto prices you can stand behind in valuations, reporting and risk checks, not only on screen.
- You want benchmark reference rates administered in line with the IOSCO principles.
- Your assets trade on many venues and you want trade and order book data from across them.
Also worth a look
- An aggregator such as CoinGecko or CoinMarketCap, when you need broad token coverage for display prices.
- Direct feeds from exchanges such as Binance or Coinbase, for the pairs where one venue sets the price.
How we get you live
The contract
We help you get your Kaiko account and contract in place, covering the data your apps will show and the reference rates your valuations will use.
The instruments
We map your asset list to Kaiko's instruments and reference rates with you, and set which source leads for each asset.
The keys
The Kaiko API key goes into your platform's secrets and nowhere else. Apps and browsers only ever see the prices the module publishes.
A full test run
The feed runs in staging against your asset list, with tick filters and failover on, before any price reaches a customer.
