November 9th, 2023
On November 9th, Kaiko participated in the Crypto Market Integrity Coalition‘s policy forum on data standards. While the roundtable was off-the-record, the below summarizes Kaiko’s perspective on standards and the importance of data providers.
The cryptocurrency industry has long had a data problem.
While there is plenty of price data available at all hours of the day, this data frequently lacks consistency and reliability, and is scattered across dozens of platforms. To give an example, today there are 204 active markets for bitcoin.
So what is the real price of bitcoin if their are 204 unique data feeds?
Further, access to more complex data such as order books is limited, and this data often requires sophisticated data pipelines due to their complexity and massive size.
Frictionless markets open 24 hours a day are what makes cryptocurrency markets so attractive. But without uniform historical and real-time market data, it can be difficult to make intelligent investment, research, and business decisions.
Every large industry has at least one trusted data provider. The traditional financial industry has Bloomberg, S&P, Thomson Reuters, and at least a dozen more providers. The crypto industry has a rich and rapidly growing data ecosystem, but there remain challenges when it comes to balancing quality with coverage.
At Kaiko, our mission is to ameliorate crypto’s data problem by providing the highest quality data with maximum coverage. The five components of our data lifecycle are thus:
Collection: we form connections to 100+ centralized and decentralized exchanges, DeFi protocols, and blockchain networks
Normalization: we make sure all data is in a standard and easily-consumable format
Data Standards: we integrate traditional financial mapping codes into our feeds, such as FIGI [Financial Instrument Global Identifier] to bring uniformity to the industry
Intelligence: we apply outlier-management and extensive quality assurance to our data, adapting them to reporting and accounting standards.
Rankings: Finally, we take all data and industry expertise to product exchange and liquidity rankings to improve investor understanding of the markets.
Critics of the crypto ecosystem often cite its lack of transparency and bad actors. Data alone may not dissuade malpractice, but it can provide valuable insights that will ultimately increase transparency and trustworthiness throughout the broader crypto ecosystem.
