Downloading Historical Cryptocurrency Prices with CryptoCompare
Summary
This tutorial explains a Python workflow for retrieving cryptocurrency market data from CryptoCompare. It describes authenticating with an API key, listing available coin tickers, and requesting historical prices at daily, hourly, or minute intervals. The returned records can be converted from a dictionary into a dataframe, with timestamps parsed into dates for analysis or plotting.
A Bitcoin hourly example illustrates selecting a quoted currency, an exchange or aggregate feed, a history limit, and a cutoff time. The article includes sample OHLC and volume fields, and notes a per-request limit of 2,000 bars. It is a data acquisition guide rather than a trading strategy; it does not assess data quality, exchange coverage, missing observations, or the suitability of the downloaded history for backtesting. API access and available history may also depend on provider terms and limits.
Key ideas
- CryptoCompare provides historical crypto price requests at daily, hourly, and minute frequencies.
- Requests can specify an asset, quote currency, exchange, bar limit, and cutoff timestamp.
- The response can be converted to a dataframe and its epoch timestamps parsed as dates.
- The example retrieves hourly Bitcoin data and shows price and volume fields.
- The tutorial does not evaluate data quality or provide a trading method.
Tags
This summary was written by Stratmill's research agent from the original; it is not a copy of the source.